
Class, 



H^E77 



^ 



Book_.OBS„ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Now Ready by the 
same Author 

Abstract Identities 



Being those of his Public Utter- 
ances which are apart from the 
Subject of his Profession, and in 
relation to the General Problems of 
Human Life 



COLLECTED AND EDITED BY 

G. LORING PIERCE, A. M., M. D. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE SURRY BOOK COMPANY 

New York 



CONCRETE 
IDENTITIES 



BY WILLIAM P. STEWART 

(Professional Actuary) 

Being those of his Public Addresses 
which have special reference to the 
Subject of Life Insurance .... 



COLLECTED AND EDITED BY 

G. LORING PIERCE, A.M., M.D. 




Published by 

THE SURRY BOOK COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two CoFit* ReccfvED 

SEP. 23 1901 

^COPYRIQMT ENTRY 

CLASSA. XXo. N«. 

COPY a 






COPYRIGHT, igoi, BY 
THE SURRY BOOK COMPANY 

New York 



MADE BY 

THE WERNER COMPANY 

AKRON, OHIO 



Dedicated in Memory of 
MY Younger Brother 

CHARLES 
Who Died a Union Volunteer 



CONTENTS 



PAGB 

Preface 7 

Woman in Life Insurance . - - . n 

New Definitions of Patriotism - - - 20 

The Sentence of Death 30 

The Accumulations of Life Insurance Com- 
panies and their Relations to the Com- 
monweal - - 32 

In the Event of War 43 

Life Insurance Funds in the Crisis of 1892-3 44 

Life Insurance and the Life Agent - - 50 

Anniversary of Fifty Years - - - - 67 

The Providence of Equation - - - - 85 

The Basis of the Life Insurance Contract 103 
Our American Visitor. Subject Treated: 

The Philosophy of Vital Statistics - 106 
The Future Earning Power of Life Insur- 
ance Investments 130 

The Story of Vital Statistics and Their 

Lessons as Concurrently Revealed - 139 

Partnership vs. Life Insurance - - - 159 

Poem on Life Insurance 163 

Equation's Warriors - 165 

The Brotherhood of Life . - - - 169 

The Tribute of a Tear - - - - - 172 

(vii) 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 



MR. William P. Stewart of New York, 
has been known for many years as a 
life insurance expert, author, and lecturer. 
In these characters he has said and written 
much that has won for him a favorable posi- 
tion in the estimation of the Insurance Press, 
and especially in the life insurance circles 
of the United States. 

In choosing the titles for the two books 
which were to collect and present his public 
addresses, it was decided to call the first 
book Abstract Identities, because it should 
present only those of his speeches which 
were of the field of literature generally, and 
therefore not of a nature to identify the in- 
dividual with the professional or surface 
phases of his life. 

This book is called Concrete Identities, for 
the opposite reason that it takes life insur- 
ance as its subject-matter, and is, therefore, 
a direct manifestation of the known person- 
ality of Mr. Stewart. The object in its prep- 
aration is the presentation of certain of his 
utterances that were born of special occa- 

(9) 



sions, and given body and publicity in re- 
ports of the daily press, in which shape they 
were soon forgotten, save as they were pre- 
served in the scrapbooks of the more mefhod- 
ical readers, or remembered only to be made 
the basis of an oft-repeated request that they 
should be published in a more permanent 
and available form. 

Strictly speaking, however, there is little 
of the life insurance text in these discourses. 
There is little of its nomenclature and noth- 
ing of its formulae. In other words, it is 
not a treatise on life insurance either from 
the actuary or the agent's instructor, but the 
relation of its intrinsic scope and character 
more as by the idealist and the poet, though 
always with the scientist's charm of truth 
and fact. 

In this collection, as in the first, I have 
been enjoined by Mr. Stewart to eliminate 
the personal, and, so far as practicable, the 
press introduction and comment. With these 
exceptions, and the straightening out of 
some inaccuracy of statement, I have pre- 
served the verbatim reports. 

G. LoRiNG Pierce, A.M., M. D. 

New York, January isi, igoi. 



[From the Argus- Leader, Sioux Falls, Saturday, June 13, 1897.] 

WOMAN IN LIFE INSURANCE 



{From a Postprandial Address) 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : — 

BEFORE addressing myself to the toast 
which has been assigned me, I wish to 
thank you directly for the honor you have 
done me in thus joining in the compliment 
of the evening, and making me your hon- 
ored guest. Your manifestations of wel- 
come have been most flatteringly tendered 
— coming as they do from not only the suc- 
cessful of those of my own profession, but 
from those of the general walks as well, 
distinguished in the like greater concerns 
and brainier councils of your state and city. 
Your presence is to be seen as the award 
of more than the good will of a business 
cult; it is, indeed, the award of a general 
honor. 

This show of regard I shall always cher- 
ish as among the most delightful experi- 
ences of my life, and particularly as giving 

(II) 



12 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

background to acquaintances made in your 
midst, that have already taken on the 
character of a permanent love. 

And now, gentlemen, addressing myself 
to your toast — ^^ Woman in Life Insur- 
ance,^^ I would say, in explanation of its 
present identity with myself, that a few 
days ago there was a banquet tendered 
me, similar to this, in the city of Des 
Moines. Among the toasts of that occa- 
sion there was this toast, and it was to 
have been responded to by a woman life- 
agent of special social prominence and of 
admitted equality with her insurance con- 
ferees. An accident prevented her attend- 
ance, and the toast was silently passed 
over. Since then the thought of it has 
haunted me, and I have so found my- 
self wondering as to what its sponsor 
had intended to say of it, that yester- 
day, when asked for my subject by your 
toastmaster, I gave him ^^ Woman in Life 
Insurance. ^^ 

I gave it not with the vanity conceived 
that I would reveal an understanding of 
woman, or deal with her as she is under- 
stood by herself, but that I might lay the 
ghost of her that was haunting me, and 
pay woman, as a sex, the homage of at 
least one such tribute — as of my wonted 
self, and as an after-dinner address — in 



WOMAN IN LIFE INSURANCE 13 

the now somewhat prominent line of my 
professional endeavor. 

As I now contemplate the subject, the 
toast is a carte blanche. It is the freedom 
of a range over all the most interesting 
phases of modern life. It may be dealt 
with as the woman life-agent, or as the 
woman assured or insured; as the woman 
social, economical, and political; as the 
woman abstract and the woman concrete; 
in fact, as the oldest and the newest prob- 
lem — the woman in all things, and the 
woman in herself. 

But, sirs, the unexpected lateness of the 
hour, and my wish to give way to the 
more assured talent that is to follow me, 
will limit my treatment of your toast. 
The exacting labors of the two-days' con- 
vention in your midst, to which this ban- 
quet is the happy sequel, left me no time 
for a prepared address. I must therefore 
come to my task as only the man can, and 
as the man should, who loves and esteems 
the sex — beginning as only the esteem-in- 
spired may, and certain as only the love- 
controlled can be — of the end. 

^^ Woman in Life Insurance. ^^ This, gen- 
tlemen, is a situation that really confronts 
you; not alone you who are in the avoca- 
tion of life insurance, but you, also, who 
are here the representatives of the various 



14 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

concerns that make up the complex char- 
acter of modern life. 

As life agents you have already scored 
the most tremendous victory for woman- 
hood the world has ever known. It is to 
you, it may be truly said, that she owes 
her present regal position in the world at 
large. It is your achievements that have 
wrought for her her general immunity from 
want. It is you that have made possible 
the gentle training she has received, the 
sweet influence of a love-lit home, and the 
hope of an assured old age. You have 
lighted for her the expectancy of a happy 
marriage, and you have guaranteed to her 
the ability to protect her children. And 
how have you done all this ? Simply by 
your enlightened work among men. 

For years and years and years, you have 
been appealing to man's better nature — to 
his strength, his fidelity, and his love. And 
to what end ? That man might uplift 
woman, that he might store for her the 
energies of his arm, the genius of his mind, 
and, when he shall have passed away, drop 
into her lap the fruits of a life's devotion. 
In such devotion man has been the more 
happy and the more noble. For him, as 
for her, every form of toil became sweet, 
for it could have the same sweet conse- 
cration, and the same sweet fruition. He 



WOMAN IN LIFE INSURANCE I5 

could love and protect his love; he could 
uplift and sustain; he could gather and 
give! 

And woman — how has she rewarded 
man ? Her life to-day tells the grand story 
of his success. Where, for the last few 
generations, the banners of life insurance 
have been carried the more forward, there 
she has become the more of delicacy, of 
refinement, and of sweetness ; and there she 
has realized in a larger sense the fulness 
of the earth — till now she is a new-born 
power. 

As the Uninsured woman was man's de- 
pendent, as the Insured she has become his 
partner, as his Beneficiary she is now to be 
reckoned with as the virility of a new life, 
the revolution of a new era. For her whole 
generations of the insured have died; for 
her these great insurance companies were 
conceived; for her their vast accumulations 
have been held and bequeathed. 

And now, has it come to this: that, as 
thus wrought for, woman is to be man's 
competitor, and to return him a thankless 
gain ? Or is she but thus to share with 
man the burden of a lightened toil — the 
treasures of a larger capitalization ? 

Of the same average plane of family, 
the young woman will be fairer than the 
young man. Her mind will be the maturer, 



l6 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

and will be seen to be the brighter; her 
aspirations will be more keen, her tastes 
less burdensome, and her ability the more 
subtle. She will be the weaker physically, 
but for the present only; for a generation 
of ennobling toil will sinew her as it has 
sinewed the toiling man. There will be 
for her the more of health and the lesser 
need of doctors; there will be the more of 
wholesome faith and the less morbidity of 
doubt. 

But, again I say: Is woman to be man's 
competitor, or his helpmeet ? The answer 
may not wholly rest with man; but it is 
evident that his life is to be restated, and 
that woman is now to be reckoned with 
throughout labor's entire domain. If man 
continues to give woman odds she will out- 
strip him; and it would appear that he is 
as yet bent on doing this, for the young 
man in the similar relations of life with 
the young woman cannot be said to have 
the same elevating aspirations, the same 
freedom from clogging habit, the same con- 
trol over the passions and temptations of 
the hour. Side by side, man may walk 
with woman, but he must walk — that is 
to say, progress! 

Woman is everywhere, now, in the throes 
of a mighty unrest. For her the goals of 
life as pictured by the romancers and poets 



WOMAN IN LIFE INSURANCE 17 

are no longer to satisfy. She will no longer 
be the relic of the dead; she proposes to 
be an individuality, to have a distinct iden- 
tity, and to accomplish in her individual 
name. No power can prevent this now. 
The manhood of to-day would not arrest 
her march if it could, for that manhood is 
still the generosity that builds our temples, 
and lays its heart upon the altars sacred 
to heaven-born love. 

Already woman is become a new eco- 
nomic question; already the doctors of 
statecraft consider of her encroachments 
on the political domain, and already the 
learned seers argue of the present, and 
prophesy of the future — their new text 
being Woman — the advanced woman, if 
you please, though I reject the term as an 
intended misnomer. 

As thus seen, woman has been the score 
of progress — and is still ; and insomuch she 
owes her present status to life insurance and 
to man. But, from the present onward, she 
is to give something as of herself, and I am 
thinking, gentlemen, that as you have 
wrought for her, so one day will she have 
wrought for you, and will have placed you 
upon still the higher pedestal. 

For the present, however, there is no mis- 
taking the fact that woman is seeking man's 
avenue to success — that she is wearing his 



l8 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

shoes while learning his tasks ; but to what 
end? Why should there not be ultimately 
a natural sex-division of the opportunities 
of life? Man has wrought through man 
his road to the ultimate and why should not 
woman, through her own sex, thus insur- 
ance-dowered and labor-inspired, come to 
a power of accomplishment that shall be as 
creative and as rewarding ? 

So, of my toast, there may be this appli- 
cation: For the woman of to-day there is 
the opportunity of the life-agent, and later 
of the life insurance manager and promoter. 
She is already the surgeon, the physician, 
the dentist, and the apothecary. She has 
become learned in the sciences and in the 
arts, and practical in the larger operations 
of trade. She is a new professional issue 
in the trained nurse, the journalist, and 
lawyer; and has already lifted the brazen 
knob of the knocker demanding entrance 
at the castle gate of political power. 

For ages she has been the work-woman 
— that is to say, the worst paid of all paid 
menials in the service of man; but from 
now on she is to demand her like share in 
what shall come to be the life opportuni- 
ties in the joint co-partnership of the sexes. 

In the field of life insurance there is for 
her, as a woman, her woman's opportunity; 
heretofore her 'efforts in this field have 



WOMAN IN LIFE INSURANCE IQ 

been disastrous failures, for she has at- 
tempted to compete with man, in the in- 
surance of man, and as man's competitor 
she failed. But as man's co-partner, seek- 
ing her sex's opportunity in her sex's life, 
she will succeed; she has already, as a life- 
agent, succeeded in a sufficient measure to 
prove the soundness of this hypothesis. 

It takes man to deal with man where 
manhood is to respond to manhood, and it 
takes woman to deal with woman where 
the like sentiment is to be drawn upon. 
Thus, as a woman always, she will be re- 
spected; as a woman striving among women 
always, she will grow strong; and, as thus, 
in a field apart, though correlated, woman 
need never be man*s competitor, save as it 
shall always mean his helpmeet. 

Gentlemen, let us welcome the co-part- 
nership of woman. [Applause.] 



[From the Daily Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, N. C, April 28, 1897.] 

NEW DEFINITIONS OF PATRIOTISM 



rJV COMPLIANCE with a call from the 
Secretary of the Southern Inter-State Iin- 
migration and Industrial Association asking 
insurance meji to meet at Southern Pines, N, 
C, about forty met here to-day. A??iong the 
principal ones was Mr, William P. Stewart 
of New York. 

The convention was called to order by the 
president who, after his remarks, called upon 
Mr. William P. Stewart, — by a careful pe- 
rusal of whose able address one will have little 
difficulty in seeing that the South is vastly the 
gainer in having Northern and Western insur- 
aiice companies doing business among us. 

The address of Mr. William P. Stezvart be- 
fore the convention : — 

Mr. President: We are here at the re- 
quest of the Southern Inter-State Immigra- 
(20) 



NEW DEFINITIONS OF PATRIOTISM 21 

tion and Industrial Association, under whose 
auspices we have understood this conven- 
tion is to be held. 

We were not sure as to its precise ob- 
ject, but we gathered that matters were to 
be discussed that would make it desirable 
for us to attend. 

Since signifying our intention to be pres- 
ent, however, agents have sent us clippings 
from several newspapers published in the 
South, which gave out that this was to be 
a convention in the interest of Southern 
insurance companies as against the North- 
ern, and with the particular object in view 
of discouraging Southern insurances in 
Northern insurance companies, on the 
ground of sectional patriotism, and because 
of a statement that we were depleting the 
South of its capital. 

I was glad to be informed by your sec- 
retary, on my arrival, that this view of 
the object of the convention was not a 
correct one; that, on the contrary, it had 
for its sole purpose the consideration of 
those measures which should invite the 
moneyed interests of the country to a 
larger capitalization of the great latent 
resources of the South, and incidentally to 
correct all misapprehensions in the South- 
ern mind as to the effects on the business 
interests of the South of the presence in 



CONCRETE IDENTITIES 



their midst of the insurance companies 
of the North. For such an object we 
can consistently be present. And I 
avail myself of this opportunity to con- 
tribute the facts, in so far as they relate 
to ourselves, and to assert what I be- 
lieve to be the truth with respect to the 
operations of the Northern companies in 
general. 

So far from our taking money from the 
South, let me tell you we are placing it 
here; and from my personal knowledge of 
the views held generally in Northern in- 
surance circles with respect to the re- 
sources and opportunities of the South, I 
know that our Northern Insurance com- 
panies are willing to avail themselves of 
every legitimate Southern investment 
tendered, restrained only by a regard for 
the fundamental law of their company- 
existence, which obliges them to seek a 
broad area of averages in order to guard 
their policy-holders from the slightest 
threat of disaster. 

The conservatism of life insurance com- 
panies with respect to the investment of 
their funds is well known in all financial 
circles, and the lead of the larger com- 
panies in such matters is unhesitatingly 
followed by the professional brokers and 
private investors, both here and abroad. 



NEW DEFINITIONS OF PATRIOTISM 23 

Now, of this mischievous charge that 
these Northern companies are taking more 
money out of the South than they are re- 
turning to it, let me tell you it cannot be 
true of the life companies at least, for 
many reasons. 

First, it must follow that, sooner or 
later, all the moneys received by the 
Northern companies from their Southern 
policy-holders, and from all their other 
policy-holders as well, must be returned to 
them as their contracts raature by death, 
or by endowment settlements, for their 
business is conducted on the mutual plan» 
and all their accumulations sooner or later 
revert to their policy-holders, in the order 
of the maturity of their claims. 

Second, there comes a time in the his- 
tory of all companies when the circuit of 
average is complete, and about as much 
money would be annually paid out as re- 
ceived, each section receiving its own quota. 

Third, the South and the West have 
been favorite investment fields for all 
Northern capital, with the disposition now, 
perhaps, strengthening in the favor of the 
South. 

To satisfy you that our disposition has 
been exceedingly flattering to Southern se- 
curities, I will recite to you the facts as 
they appear in the official records. 



24 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

The convincing statistics which were submitted 
are omitted, because in substance covered by the 
general text. 

As I have before stated, the disposition 
of Northern capital is to seek its oppor- 
tunity in these growing sections of our 
country. 

But this, after all, is not the standpoint 
from which to judge a community's inter- 
ests in the investment of insurance funds. 
This concerns directly and solely the pol- 
icy-holder himself. 

The money paid by a Southern policy- 
holder to a Northern company is for indi- 
vidual protection, — -the establishment of 
his wife and children beyond the reach of 
poverty, when he shall have been removed 
by death; and the maintenance of his own 
after-life, when his years shall cease to be 
productive. In the doing of this he does 
not stipulate for the investment of his 
money either South or North but for its 
safe employment. 

It is to his company he will look when 
his policy matures, and not to his State or 
city. For he knows not in what State or 
city his future may be cast, or in what 
part of the world, finally, he may claim 
the return of his investment. He knows 
the South will no more care for him and 



NEW DEFINITIONS OF PATRIOTISM 25 

his than the North, if he has failed to 
care for himself. 

His first choice is what he understands 
to be the best company. His sole purpose 
is to guarantee the future. In the making 
of this provision he cannot afford to in- 
dulge the sentiment of section, for in this 
the section has no claim upon his consid- 
eration, for it would show none to his de- 
pendent old age, nor to his dependent 
widow and orphans were he to so fail in 
the selection of his company as to prefer 
section to the broader business guarantees 
which might be available. 

Among the policy-holders of this com- 
pany, as of all the companies doing busi- 
ness in the South, will be found your most 
representative men, will be found your 
braniest projectors, your most successful 
merchants, and the most daring of your 
financiers. It is not these who are com- 
plaining of their companies, that they do 
not invest their money South; for, in so 
much, all these men are seeking to build 
beyond the vortex, and to put so much, 
at least, above the reach of financial re- 
verses. 

Who are they, then, who start such 
issues ? Are they the Southern companies ? 
I should say no; a thousand times no; for 
they cannot be so short-sighted; for theirs 



26 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

is the entire North to forage over, the 
West and East to bring under tribute 
to the South. They are necessarily no 
more confined to the South than are the 
Northern companies to the North. Their 
right of occupancy embraces the Union — 
and the North will not say them nay. 

Whence, then, this hint of antagonism to 
Northern companies ? It is from those 
who can have no stake in the issue, or 
who know not the falsity of what they 
print. It is to set such as these right that 
I have spoken. 

And now, Mr. President, if you please, I 
will say a few words in a more general 
way. This convention will have at least 
accomplished a twofold good, whatever 
else may come of it. It will have shown 
the country and the world at large, the 
confidence these great conservative North- 
ern companies have in the future of the 
South. And it will show the Southern 
insurer how much wiser he builded than 
he knew. 

But I respectfully submit, that I think 
the hint of sectionalism, in the title under 
which this meeting has been publicly des- 
ignated, ^^ The Southern Inter-State Insur- 
ance Conference, ^^ savors somewhat of a 
back number. I cannot but think that the 
dominant people of both the South and 



NEW DEFINITIONS OF PATRIOTISM 27 

the North to-day prefer that these inter-State 
conventions should be lined on the breadth 
of the American continent; that they 
prefer such efforts should be made, not to 
add lustre, merely, to the one star in the 
broad field of our common flag, but to 
the whole constellation which symbols our 
glorious Union. 

The entire North, to you, is in this but 
the larger mutual life. We exchange with 
you our sons and daughters. We exchange 
with you our labor, our brain force, and 
our capital; but more than all we exchange 
with you that upright manhood, that ster- 
ling business integrity, which makes us the 
respected, the trusted, and the beloved of 
all the earth. 

It is as a country we are known, it is as 
a people we are considered, it is as Ameri- 
cans we are strong; but it will be as the 
individual only that we shall win the suc- 
cesses of life, for there is more in this 
than the getting of the dollar merely, for 
there is the finding in this the immortal 
soul and all that makes for eternity. 

There can be no one here who' does not 
feel in his heart the love of country. But 
shall this love narrow to the grave that 
shall hold our ashes, or shall it broaden 
to the universe, of which we are all born 
heirs ? 



28 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

There can be no one here who does not 
love his home, but shall it be confined to 
the one fireside or shall it include the 
hearthstone of our children, and our chil- 
dren's children, as they shall go out into 
the larger land ? 

There can be no one here who does not 
love the God-father, but this when rightly 
communed with, makes the world all father- 
land, and all humanity a common race, and 
North and South and East and West the 
circuit of its heart-throb. 

Gentlemen, we are here to-day of a larger 
stature than a single section. We are fed 
with more than the products of the South; 
we are clothed with more than the fabrics 
of the North. Our minds are cultured with 
the thought of uncounted centuries, and 
our souls reflect the light of an infinite 
dawn. But for the moment we are human, 
and must contend with the infirmities of 
the physical being; this is divided by en- 
vironment, and held to its locality. To 
its immediate needs there must be ad- 
dressed the practicable, to its individuality 
there must be conceded the right of con- 
tention, but this only as for a larger com- 
munity, unless we are to arrest progress 
and stultify our every protestation of love, 
of faith, and of patriotism. We cannot 
believe in ourselves if we do not believe 



NEW DEFINITIONS OF PATRIOTISM 29 

in others ; we can have no South without a 
North, no West without an East. We can 
do nothing for ourselves alone. 

For the one man there can be no Heaven ; 
for the one earth no universe; for the one 
sun no stars; our bodies are an association 
of atoms; our minds the aggregation of 
ideas; our souls the convergence of the 
rays of an infinite God. Existence is a 
compact. In some things we are all debt- 
ors, in some things all creditors, but at no 
time can the balance be struck — by noth- 
ing the scales of justice be evenly poised. 

This has been the reasoning of the great 
minds of all times, and this should be our 
conclusion here — no South no North, but 
an effort to get on together in a mutual 
understanding of the better ends, and a 
mutual subscription to each others' needs. 

Sir, I have the honor — Gentlemen, I thank 
you. 



[From the San Antonio Daily Express, Friday, March 12, 1897.} 

THE SENTENCE OF DEATH 



{Concluding Part of aji After Dinner Address 
to Life Insurance Agents') 



BUT there is a special significance to this 
occasion. There is the immediate les- 
son of the hour, wherein the instructor has 
yet to be heard to a more sharply defined 
conclusion. 

There is the moral of our lesson to en- 
join. 

Think of it, young man, with the appear- 
ance of the first gray hair you have been 
summoned to the bar of life, and there sen- 
tenced to die. The cheek may yet be ruddy 
with the glow of health, the eye as yet 
glisten with the freshness of its youthful 
light, but death will have entered in, and 
its fateful presence will be symboled in that 
one white strand. 

You can no longer flatter yourself that 
life is indefinite — that you are invulner- 
able. From the appearance of that first 
gray hair, the picture has been turned to 
the wall. The entire aspect of existence 
reversed. Virtue may interpose delay, and 
(30) 



THE SENTENCE OF DEATH 31 

science reprieve, but the block is there, 
and the ax upraised. The decree is inex- 
orable. You are to die. 

There is to be no haste, no cruel rigor. 
You will have time to make ready, and so 
to prepare for the inevitable, that you may 
go to it as to a couch of roses; but beware 
of the fatal mistake that would delude you 
with concealment of this tell-tale sign. 
Here youth divides from you, and the world 
goes with it. Here age embraces and life's 
winter has begun. 

For this has nature lavished the charms 
of youth, for this has been prodigal of her 
warmth and light, that death should not 
make gray hair a crucifixion, or its well- 
meant touch the chilliness of despair. 

It is for you, life agents, to point the 
moral of this: To admonish and prepare. 
Your lesson is the voice of experience. 
Your line of work the power of knowledge, 
the succor of a stored-up manhood. In your 
every word and act there is this precept 
uttered and emphasized, ^^Lay by for win- 
ter, so that when the snowflakes fall, life 
may be housed and comfortable. Lay by, 
not alone for the winter of the orphan or 
of the widow, but for age isolated by the 
grayness of its locks, and now loosing, finger 
by finger, its grip on the opportunity of its 
times. ^^ 



[From the Journal of Finance, January 28, 1896. J 

THE ACCUMULATIONS OF LIFE IN- 
SURANCE COMPANIES AND 
THEIR RELATIONS TO 
THE COMMONWEAL 



(Farf of an Address Before the Physicians' Club 
of Chicago. The Invitation of the Club Ex- 
pressly Called for an Address 07i Some One of 
the More Important Phases of life Insurance) 

Mr. Chairman a7id Gentlemen: — 

IT IS within my recollections that a life in- 
surance exponent would not expect to be 
feted on such an occasion as this, much 
less be deliberately invited by the repre- 
sentative minds of the highest social and 
intellectual calling in the world to be their 



Note — Owing to voice- failure, at the last hour, Mr. 
Stewart dictated his intended discourse, and it was read 
by Dr. Denslow I^ewis of Chicago. 
(32) 



LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES 33 

honored guest, and to present to them an 
after-dinner speech on the subject of life 
insurance as the treat of the evening. In 
nothing is the broadening of intelligent 
life more manifest than in this. 

Prejudices are being swept aside as cob- 
webs from the crannies of ignorance. A 
quarter of a century ago the ordinary 
mind shrunk from the thought of death. It 
was not pleasant to be told that you must 
die, and so presently to accept the fact 
that' you must join the procession of sack- 
cloth wearers, and immolate yourself upon 
the altar of duty, in an apprehensive ex- 
pectancy of the grim event. 

The life agent in those days was a 
preacher of dissolution. If he did not wear 
the badge of the professional mourner, he 
was more generally recruited from the 
ranks of those lachrymose preachers who 
wept with you over the fancied bereave- 
ment of your widow. 

I have heard the great Talmage delin- 
eate such a scene. ^^ There lay the man,^^ 
he said, ^^ stretched upon the bed of death. 
At his side knelt his weeping widow. On 
either hand a child, and at the foot the 
minister, who was pouring into their ach- 
ing souls the tender consolation of the 
double fact that this good man had not 
only anticipated this dreadful scene, but 
3 



34 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

had made the Christian preparation for it 
in that he had insured his life in a solvent 
company, and taken out a policy with 
God.» 

A quarter of a century ago, I say to 
you, gentlemen, as you have doubtless ob- 
served in your own experience, the mind 
shrunk from the thought of death as it 
does not do to-day. We have grown in hu- 
man stature; we have grown in conscious 
dignity. We have been made familiar with 
the inevitable, but we have learned that 
life is an average sum, within which lies 
the potentialities of eternity for all of us. 
We have learned that as one expression 
of this sum production can guarantee sup- 
port; that life, even as a physical institu- 
tion, can guarantee its perpetuity; that 
poverty is but an incident of improvi- 
dence, and that the wiser uses of life's 
sum will at least wrench famine from the 
hand of death, and strip disease of its 
most potent ally — the crime that is born 
of poverty. 

To the labors of the life agent must be 
attributed this lessening of the fear of 
death; this growth in its conception as of 
the commonplace and admissible. 

Hence, I am here as the exponent of life 
insurance, singularly enough, as the guest 
of those whose profession it is to flaunt 



LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES 35 

death in every form. But it is not as the 
exponent of the old conception of life in- 
surance. 

No, as I have said before, the world has 
grown in the last quarter of a century, 
and the minds and purposes of men have 
broadened. The subject of life insurance 
has now a more winsome and seductive 
approach. Its advocates talk to you of 
the needs of life itself; of the threatened 
impoverishment of the old man, of im- 
provident age, wrecked at the very thresh- 
old of the more magnificent temple of 
existence — that of sustained wisdom. 

It is not a question now of passing round 
the hat when a man dies, or of his friends, 
contributing to a decent burial. In a way 
the admission is made that he may die; 
that he may leave a widow dependent and 
often unprovided for, and that as a mat- 
ter of course he should make the contract 
with a community of industrial life, which 
the institution of Life Insurance makes 
practicable, by means of which his con- 
ception of the monetary value of his life 
may be realized as a part of the assets of 
his estate, and so make a certain provision 
for those who may be left dependent. 

But as viewed from the standpoint of 
the sum of life, the possibility of death 
is very remote — so remote that it arrests 



36 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

nowhere the energies of life — the progress 
of the world — the consummation of its 
higher and nobler existence — the perpe- 
tuity of the aspirations of the soul. 

It is seen that the dependent is to be 
life itself, the old father, the old mother, 
the maimed, and possibly malformed off- 
spring. It is seen that home cravings 
deepen with the advance of years, and 
that the need and mission of home widens. 
It is not the little ones toddling at the 
knees of the young mother that I see, but 
the grown-up waifs of life who have lost 
their grip in one form or another, and 
who come back with an aching heart to be 
soothed at the hearthstone of parental old 
age, genial in its sustainment and kindly 
in its own past suffering. 

I see, as the inspiration of the higher 
and nobler functions of life insurance to- 
day, a scene that is the converse of the 
group sketched by the vivid piety of Doc- 
tor Talmage. 

I see the approach of a desolate old age. 
I see nature's great patrimony to youth 
squandered in the generous impulses of its 
nature. I see the years of productiveness 
roll away, with their green fields and 
golden grain, and in their stead the snow- 
crowned summits of life's ever colder win- 
ter. I see the rude awakening of sleeping 



LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES 37 

youth, the filmy illusions of its dreams dis- 
sipated by the daylight of adversity, that 
first frosty breath of reality that numbs 
and withers the ideals of our hope. I see 
the old man, not dead, but dying, not of 
physical disease, but of a lost step in the 
march of life. Nor he alone, but his old 
wife, for why should man be forever pic- 
tured to the mind by the life agent with 
a background of a weeping widow and a 
group of orphans in sombre mourning ? 

It is a revelation of vital statistics that 
men and women live; that, as a rule they 
go on together in partnership as man and 
wife into the vale, and sometimes into the 
shadow of years ; that of a -thousand lives, 
men and women standing up to be counted 
at the age of twenty-five, there will be 
over six hundred of them alive at the age 
of sixty-five, a period that I call the thresh- 
old of old age ; for, rightly-lived and wisely 
planned-for, life should be only then upon 
the summit of its power, and endued with 
the larger and more potent energies of the 
mind. No! The appeal to life insurance 
to-day is heard from the lips of pitiable old 
age. The intensity of its crusade through 
unthinking life to-day is born of the reali- 
zation of this far greater need. 

The inspiration of the minister is to 
make man good; of the doctor to keep 



38 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

him well; of the life agent to make him 
provident — to win him from the fleshpots 
of the present; to store tip something in 
the brine of mutual guarantee that will 
give him the support of a community of 
means when life's summer is past, and na- 
ture goes into that chrysalis state from 
which comes forth the decrepit pantaloon 
or the star-crovN^ned majesty of soul. 

This, then, is one of the functions of the 
great accumulations of modern Life Insur- 
ance. It is to make Life Insurance insure 
not merely death, but life as well ; not 
merely for the widow or for the orphan, 
made so by death, but the widowhood 
of life itself — the men, the women, the 
children, made so by the improvidence 
of youth, and the thoughtless wasting of 
opportunity, or the reckless squandering of 
present means. It is to meet age at its 
threshold, and invest it anew with the 
intensified strength of its manhood, with 
the chastened yet brightened hopes of its 
youth ; with the calmer, yet sweeter im- 
pulses of its passion, and lead it to a couch 
that will be of honor alike to God and 
Humanity. 

But these very accumulations that have 
been and are being so providently reared, 
and for a purpose so benign, bring upon 
the life companies an often bothersome 



LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES 39 

animadversion. It is done mainly in ig- 
norance of their true functions, and yet 
the barb is often pointed by malice, and 
shot with the assassin's aim of the would- 
be blackmailer. 

Whence come all these piled up millions ? 
The promoters of the illusive non-accumula- 
tion Life Insurance schemes in opposition 
decry them as unnecessary, and a threat to 
the normal condition of things, but those 
whose faith and genius have established 
these great funds know them to be poten- 
tialities for the accomplishment of a vaster 
good than has ever otherwise been 
accomplished by the means of money 
merely. As symbolical of this, and sig- 
nificant of the spirit which furthers it all, 
there stands to-day in one of your parks a 
statue erected to the memory of Abraham 
Lincoln, provided for by a policy of Life 
Insurance upon the life of one of your 
late great citizens. 

No, gentlemen! Not to enslave, but to 
free; not to stand in the pathway of prog- 
ress, but to accelerate its pace. These 
funds are from the people, and are pledged 
to the people. They are first to supply 
their living needs, and, in the event of 
death, to perpetuate their nobler wills. 
These accumulations are not mushroom 
growths, nor poisonous weeds. They spread 



40 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

their broad branches as no upas tree, but 
as a cooling and umbrageous shade in the 
summer of endeavor, and as a canopy of 
warmth and comfort when the sun of youth 
is hidden, and the wintry skies of age 
close round. 

It is history, that the accumulations of 
life insurance companies have never been 
corruptly applied. This is true of all lands 
and all peoples. It is the one sacred trust 
in humanity that has never been defiled. 
There have been personal obliquities, there 
have been false administrators, but the 
many have spurned the one, and the in- 
stitutions it has planted have thrived and 
fruited as that one immaculate conception 
of the human mind which strengthens the 
diviner trust in God, and inspires a larger 
hope of Heaven. 

These accumulations of life insurance 
are wholly impersonal. They are affected 
by no party greed or ambition. They are 
from the public, and for the public — con- 
secrated to its good always. 

How are they invested ? As a rule to 
every State is returned, in the fostering of 
some of its public undertaking, its quota 
of these insurance funds as they are con- 
tributed to by its people. The published 
statement of any of these insurance com- 
panies will show this. Thus establishing 



LIFE INSURANCE COMPANIES 4^ 

the fact that by means of these life insur- 
ance accumulations, national enterprises 
are floated, States sustained, and municipal 
values increased. That by their policy 
settlements homes are built, the family tie 
strengthened, religion conserved, education 
advanced, and every conceivable good at- 
tained that can flow from hope and energy. 

Suppose such accumulations had not been 
in existence in the years 1892-93 — do you 
believe that we should have escaped the 
threatened disasters of that fateful period 
as we did ? I do not. In my judgment it 
was these very accumulations that arrested 
the tide of disaster, and calmed the trepi- 
dations of panic. 

The life insurance companies of the 
country did not hoard or sell their green- 
backs ; they did not withdraw from the 
banks, and shrink their resources. No, 
they at once became the great clearing 
houses of the people. Their deposits in 
individual banks were allowed to remain. 
The premium receipts as they came in 
were at once redistributed in loans or fresh 
deposits, and so kept on the current of the 
people's commercial life. This was scarcely 
true of the individual depositor, as it could 
hardly be true of capital in its individual 
ownership, for this must necessarily be al- 
ways selfish and timid, and disposed to act 



42 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

Upon the first law of its nature, that of 
self-preservation. 

It is thus to be understood of these life 
insurance accumulations, that though they 
came from the individual policy holders, and 
belonged to the individual policy holder — 
that they nevertheless took on a character 
and discharged a function that was bene- 
ficially general. They were daily put in 
by the laborer, the farmer, the mechanic, 
and the merchant — by philanthropy and 
greed alike, — by faith and fear, yet by the 
wisdom of their administrators they were 
made to go back throughout the entire 
country, to all sources a benison always, 
and a blessing everywhere. 



[From an Interview Published in the St. Lords Globe-Democrat, April 4, 1898.] 

IN THE EVENT OF WAR 



As TO the position of the great insurance 
corporations in the event of war, there 
can be no question of their steadfastness to 
duty and obligation. They are of the peo- 
ple and for the people, irrespective of party 
or banner. They are as the great tents of 
humanity spread upon the battlefields of 
the world, over which floats the white flag 
of universal benignity, — emblazoned with 
the red cross of universal providence. All 
powers will respect these, and to all prac- 
tical ends they will discharge their due 
functions of equity and protection. Such 
has been their history heretofore in the 
struggles of nation with nation. 

(43) 



[From the Indicator, Detroit, January 15, 1896.] 

LIFE INSURANCE FUNDS IN THE 
CRISIS OF 1892--93 



{Receptio7i and Banquet at the Detroit Club 
— Portions of the Address) 



AFTER heartily expressing his apprecia- 
^^^ tion of the honor coiif erred upon him 
by the presence of a body so representative 
of the solid intellectual and business energies 
of Detroit, Mr. Stewart said he presumed 
that he had been invited to speak on the sub- 
ject of Life Insurance as a graceful intima- 
tion that he would be at liberty to choose the 
most fa77iiliar subject for treatment. But it 
was 710 1 his i7iclinatio7i to talk shop on such 
an occasion, particularly as the presence of 
reporters 77iade it certai7i that what 7night be 
said by him would fi7id its way into print, 

(44) 



LIFE INSURANCE FUNDS 45 

and so challenge consideration as an adroit 
advertisement, which he would not like to make 
them a party to. On the other hand, a fresh 
contribution to literature or the science of life 
underwriting could not be wrought without 
study, save as it came as one of the happiest 
inspirations of the moment. 

There were, however, he said, some phases 
of the insurance problem, in its abstract re- 
lations to the financial and business 7suorld, 
which he believed had not been touched upon 
in public utterance, and which he thought he 
might venture as a suitable response to their 
request. In coming to these Mr. Stewart 
said: — 

I have often heard business men ex- 
press apprehension as to the magnitude of 
the life insurance companies of this coun- 
try, and question if there is not danger in 
the accumulation of such large amounts of 
money under the administration of single 
corporations, and to wonder when the limit 
would be found, if ever. Many imagine 
the wealth thus held in accumulation to 
have been wrongfully withheld from dead 
policy-holders. There is, with this appre- 
hension, mingled the popular distrust of 



46 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

corporations and the unjustified belief that 
they employ their vast powers to subvert 
the people's will. 

All this comes of but seeing on the 
surface of things. As the reverse of this, 
it should be known that a modern life in- 
surance company undertakes, through its 
policy contracts, to do more than provide 
for the widow and orphan left destitute by 
death. By* far its larger agreement is to 
accumulate for, and pay to, the living, in- 
cluding the life insured, so that age and 
living dependency, in all its forms, may 
be equally protected. This is the secret 
of, and necessity for, the large accumula- 
tions which are so thoughtlessly questioned, 
and which in themselves are so hope in- 
spiring, and so significant of the wisdom 
and thrift of American productive life. 

The outer world of to-day is optimistic. 
It is from the back woods of its existence 
only that the cry of pessimism is heard. 
It is because of the providence that is be- 
ing erected by nineteenth-century thought 
that the present is so expectant. Love is 
now the text of the pulpit, peace the aspi- 
ration of enterprise, and hope the glad 
voicing of the press in all lands. 

Coming back to the life companies and 
their accumulations of money, I can say of 
their managements that they have never 



LIFE INSURANCE FUNDS 47 

yet united as in the nature of a trust, and 
that it can never be possible for them to 
do so. These companies are of the people, 
and for the people, and their interests are 
ever in unity with the people's needs. 

Do you know that when the war broke 
out between the North and the South, 
these corporations put aside that portion 
of their funds belonging to the Southern 
policy-holders and paid it out to them, or 
to their representatives, at its close ? Do 
you know that in the early stages of the 
war, when the government undertook to 
place a bond issue at a critical moment in 
its existence, it was these corporations who 
came to its rescue, and by their subscrip- 
tions at once established its credit and 
made possible the victory for civilization 
which followed ? 

And do you know that in the financial 
crisis that came upon us in 1892-93, it was 
the action of these corporations that 
stemmed the tide of disaster and rescued 
the people's credit ? When the sources of 
money were being dried up as the rivulets 
of a life-giving stream, when individual 
fear and avarice conspired to withdraw 
from circulation the gold and even the 
currency of the country, when greenbacks 
were at a premium, when no man's prop- 
erty was available for a loan at ten cents 



48 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

on the dollar, when the reserves of the 
government were depleted, and the re- 
serves of the banks themselves threatened, 
it was these life insurance companies that 
stood to the front as a solid wall, and 
rolled back the mad ruck that threatened 
a universal ruin. 

This was their style of reasoning: We 
are made up of the people, our policy- 
holders are the capitalists, the manufac- 
turers, the business men, and the workers 
of the country. We must conserve their 
interest if we would conserve our own. 
Better that we should risk losing some 
portion of our accumulations in the loss of 
deposits, than suffer, unopposed, a shrink- 
age in the value of it all, by supinely per- 
mitting that disruption of trade which now 
threatens, and the consequent ruin to thou- 
sands of industries and to their dependent 
relations, which must follow, and which 
must visit upon policy-holders as a body, a 
far greater financial disaster than would be 
the offering up of all our accumulations, if 
these could be expended in a successful 
maintenance of public faith. 

So then, while private capitalists were 

nervously withdrawing their funds, and 

banks were everywhere feeling the pres- 

' sure of excited runs, and here and there 

the weaker banks were contributing by 



LIFE INSURANCE FUNDS 49 

their closed doors to the general excite- 
ment, it was these life insurance companies 
that said to the banks we will not with- 
draw our deposits, you can bank upon 
these as so much money permanently 
loaned ; more than that, the premium 
moneys as they daily come in from our 
policy-holders shall be daily deposited with 
you, so that there shall be no contraction 
of the general currency through us, and so 
that there may be a daily reissue to the 
public of that circulation, which is so es- 
sential to its well being. 

From that time on there were no more 
bank failures. This confidence begot con- 
fidence, banks joined with banks, the clear- 
ing houses became unlimited creditors, and 
the strategic forts of finance were securely 
held. Gentlemen, all this you may not 
have known, or knowing, may not have 
considered how miraculously provident 
were these vast accumulations of the peo- 
ple's money, and how benignantly wise 
were their administrators. Gentlemen, I 
thank you. 
4 



[From the Boston Herald, Wednesday, February 24, 1894.] 

LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE 
AGENT 



{Postprandial Addi^ess Delivered before the 

Massachusetts Life Underwriters' 

Association) 



]\/TR' W. P, STEWART, of New York, 

made an interesting address on the life 

insurance agent and the great influence for 

good which had been exerted upon civilization 

thereby. He said: — 

Mr, President and Gentleme^i: I thank 
you for the kindly applause with which 
you have greeted the announcement of my 
name. I hope you will continue to be in- 
dulgent, for while I am only too happy to 
be with you, and only too anxious to do 
credit to the position you have assigned 
me, the Grip, a tour through Mexico, and 
the constancy of professional duty, have 
deprived nie of that surplus vitality which 
(50) 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 5^ 

I had hoped to serve up to you in royal 
good fellowship, if not in the lines of an 
acceptable speech. 

In the absence of any set subject as- 
signed me, I am bound to assume that you 
have invited me to discuss with you the 
merits of your calling, and that you have 
expected me to speak, not alone as to 
yourselves, but as to the public at large, 
also. It is, therefore, m this character that 
I shall address you; and I beg you to bear 
with me while I submit as my premises 
propositions that will hold at first but a 
doubtful appearance of identity. 

Immortality, liberty, and equality are the 
three distinctive aspirations of human life. 
With every race there has been born the 
desire to perpetuate individuality. Through 
every age there has been threaded the 
dream of an after state. 

To be sure, there have been those, 
speaking in the name of science, or as 
having overcome what they have called 
the vanity of existence, that have striven 
to controvert all evidence in support of 
such a faith; nevertheless, it is held as 
the sweetest and most 

CONSOLING THOUGHT OF LIFE, 

and the consensus of the world's intellect 
and worth has honored those most who 



52 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

have been most instrumental in deepening 
and strengthening this belief. 

In my judgment every organization which 
tends to the strengthening of this hope is 
a public benefaction. [Applause.] For my- 
self, I could never see anything to laugh 
at in what used to be termed the military 
burlesque of the Salvation Army. 

I said in my first study of its plan of 
operations, as I say again to-night, I believe 
that before the world is a hundred years 
older, liberty will owe to it one of its 
greatest victories. Its growth is almost like 
the revelation and spread of a new religion, 
and the perfect equality it gives to woman 
is but one of the elements in the secret of 
its success. 

I may say, in passing, no religion in 
the world's history ever spread of its own 
spontaneity save that taught by Jesus of 
Nazareth, — in which woman was for the 
first time placed by the side of man, and 
that taught by Mohammed, — which deified 
her as the diviner essence. [Applause.] 

But it is not to advertise the Salvation 
Army that I allude to it to-night, but to 
tell you that the nearer a proposition comes 
to the instinctive aspirations of the people 
the nearer it will get to the people, and 
that a nearness to the people means a 
nearness to God; and that it is to this 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 53 

I attribute the success of the Salvation Army, 
as it is to this, also, that I attribute the 
success of the institution of life insurance. 

You see, these propositions are not talked 
through the formality of the pulpit merely 
— they come down to the street and go 
out to the lives of men, as in the familiarity 
of a friendship or in the nearness of a life 
in common. 

So, again, as old as the first realization 
of its subjection the human heart 

HAS THROBBED FOR LIBERTY. 

Individuality has sought its Ego, though 
mole-like it burrowed in the dirt of ignor- 
ance; though worm-like it existed but to 
enrich the earth. To be free, the bird 
rushes from its cage-imprisonment, but, 
ignorant and alone, only to be pecked to 
death by the birds of a stranger species. 

So has life after life and race after race 
rushed out from the cast of their birthhold 
to die for liberty — as yet sought for at the 
altar of their gods, or as yet made the edict 
of a human law, themselves as yet unequal 
to the tests imposed, or unable to under- 
stand or serve the justice of their cause. 

So England makes boast of it, and so 
America claims part in it, and hardly a 
nation, now, but does the same ; and yet 
life, as we observe it, still seeks its liberty 



54 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

as yet to be, for the wise tell us it is to 
be found only in the conquest over self, 
and necessity tells us it is to be found only 
in the sufficient income; but the truer con- 
ception is seen in the nineteenth-century 
struggle, which is for liberty as through 
light — the enlargement of the mind, the 
voicing of the soul. 

It is for thought to get nearer to itself, 
to ignore the accident of birth, to burst 
the barriers of the schools, and bring all 
study to the test of use. 

It is in this sense that I hail the Chau- 
tauqua circles as the birth of the school of 
schools; the leadership through the later 
wilderness to the later Canaan; the way 
out from the pride of learning to the de- 
mocracy of understanding ; a stepping-down 
from the august throne of knowledge to 
that mind-touch and heart-touch and soul- 
touch which means the liberty that is born 
of all — the nearness that is shared with 
God. [Applause.] 

To this great movement life insurance 
has prepared the way. It has already gar- 
nered up and spread abroad those general 
means which are essential to the 

FULL FRUITION OF SUCH A PLAN. 

In this, as in the service of the Church, 
and in that of its eccentric warrior, the 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 55 

Salvation Army, the life agent is the builder 
of the material means. 

But there is the third instinct, and this 
has been ever present with us, and will be 
to the end of time — that of equality. The 
wiser and the nobler would uprear and still 
uprear its plane, but the ignorant would 
pull down or seek on earth, and of the 
earth, the pledge of peership and fraternal 
love. In its fair name some of the most 
bloody scenes have been enacted, some of 
the most cruel exercises of power have 
been indulged in, and in its name to-day 
some of the most cowardly deeds are daily 
chronicled. 

But no one of its master minds, no one 
of its daring leaders, no one of its self- 
made martyrs, has ever sown a single 
thought, or reared a single act, that is 
symbol of the distinctive wish itself. As a 
blind Samson, it is goaded to the destruc- 
tion of the temple that God has as yet 
denied it the knowledge to again uprear 
as better. 

Here, then, enters the insurance proposi- 
tion again. Equality, as yet, has no plan 
for its realization, save as the great army 
of life agents strive with the proposition 
of science and wisdom in its behalf, hold- 
ing that physical and mental equality can 
be had only as the average of the whole 



56 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

— the individuality being preserved — and 
that a common level would be but like the 
dead wastes of the desert sands. 

The newspapers will print columns of 
the lucubrations of almost anybody, on al- 
most any subject, from the contentions of 
a foot ball game to the speculations on the 
orbit of a suspected planet, or on the path 
of an erratic comet; but, as a rule, they 
will treat life insurance as only in the na- 
ture of a business, and as one that should 
be made to pay distinctly and specifically 
for every reference made to it. 

The great men in the ranks of life in- 
surance — and there are those in it whom 
we know to be great, indeed, in all those 
qualities which are held to aggregate in 
the sublimity of character — are rarely ever 
chronicled in the public press as such. 
Their accomplishments rarely find notice 
outside the columns of the insurance press, 
and even as seen in these perhaps more or 
less distorted through the 

LENS OF A COMPETITIVE VISION. 

As individually met, at large, the aver- 
age life agent is regarded as a representa- 
tive citizen of admitted ability, and, in the 
larger relations to his work, really a man 
of marked talent, yet, unlike those in iden- 
tity with almost any other undertaking in 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 57 

life, he must be great outside of his chosen 
work to be signalized to posterity. 

Perhaps, as looking more from the house- 
tops than the average man, Chauncey M. 
Depew is credited with the saying that the 
ablest minds of the country are found in 
the service of the railroads and the insur- 
ance companies. I will not echo an as- 
sertion so broad, for I give no second place 
to the great men of our churches and of 
our schools, but I will say that I regard 
the able life-worker as entitled to rank with 
these, and worthy of the same public rec- 
ognition that is accorded them. 

Now this is one of the respects in which 
I build on the life underwriters' associa- 
tions. You are going to divest life insur- 
ance of its partisan character. You are 
going to place it with the newspapers as a 
general proposition. I think you have ac- 
complished a great deal already in this 
direction. Many daily papers of late have 
given it this general status in their col- 
umns. 

Beside, you are drawing the dominant 
minds of the community into fellowship 
with you. This fact alone is an inspira- 
tion, and is certain to ultimate in a wider 
intellectual interest in your work. 

I think I am safe in saying that few 
people outside of the ranks of life insur- 



58 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

atice have a conception of its magnitude 
or of its power, and certainly I may safely 
say that we who have made it a profes- 
sion and a life-long study confess our in- 
ability to grasp its fullest significance. 
The identity it suggests includes the entire 
realm of the physical, the mental, and the 
moral domain. As a principle it ranks as 

THE GEM IN THE CAP OF WISDOM. 

The conscience, the heart, and the mind 
receive it without doubt. Every other 
operative principle in the world's history 
has had its seism, but the great principle 
of economic equation, which underlies the 
practice of life insurance, has never known 
an intelligent antagonism. 

Wherever its operations have been the 
more persistently urged forward and suc- 
cessfully enlarged the community has real- 
ized the larger accretion of wealth, and 
consequently the larger industrial, intel- 
lectual, and moral progress. 

I might pertinently ask how many of you 
here to-night, learned as so many of you 
are in the world's lore, and representatives 
as you all are of its higher walks, and I 
would even go so far as to include you who 
are the practical exponents of its effect, 
have realized as you have glanced over the 
affairs of this great nation how much of its 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 59 

material prosperity is due to the compre- 
hensive proposition of the life office. 

As your looks confess, this has not been 
with you a subject of speculation, and yet, 
if you will but think that every dollar 
saved by the individual is not only a con- 
tribution to personal, but to popular wealth, 
and that it being confessed that as indi- 
viduals grow wealthy they grow more po- 
tent in their several parts of endeavor, it 
is then to be admitted that as communities 
grow wealthier their operations, for all that 
counts in the line of civilization, grow 
more extended, and, as the factor more 
potent than all others in the inception and 
aggregation of popular savings is that of 
life insurance, it is to be seen, and in sim- 
ple justice confessed, that the success of 
its operations is the measure of the guar- 
antees given by the present to future im- 
provement. 

The fact that life insurance has not re- 
ceived the consideration due is not confined 
to America. I have met the great states- 
men in several parts of the world, and, 
while I have been led into varied discus- 
sions with these, I have never been asked, 

SAVE BY THREE PERSONS, 

to present for their understanding the socio- 
economic phases of life insurance. 



60 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 



Of course, there is some general thought 
given the subject of popular savings, and 
there is a good deal of moral admonition 
vouchsafed the young man to lay by for the 
capitalization of his after life; but where 
is the moral pointed that he should insure 
his life to this end ? 

The advice is reiterated in the literature 
of life insurance, to be sure, but outside of 
this in what learned treatise on right living 
is there found, as the fundamental axiom, 
^^ Insure your life^^? And yet, as a savings 
proposition, it is the most practicable, the 
most comprehensive, and the most benig- 
nant that can be conceived. [Applause.] 

As but leading the mind to a contempla- 
tion of its inherent potencies, I ask you to 
consider that it takes a few dollars from 
the many, which, if returned to them indi- 
vidually as savings, would be too trivial to 
capitalize them for any more potent effort, 
yet which, as taken on account of a life 
policy (which matures in full at the death 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 6l 

of the one in the many) becomes at once 
a concreted capital for the beneficiaries of 
such, and which capital, though but a part 
of the aggregation of all such minor savings, 
is in itself, by the very nature of the prop- 
osition which created it, at once a sum suf- 
ficient for the enlargement of the oppor- 
tunity and the vitalization of the energies 
of those it comes to. 

And it comes to them not as a debt to 
burden them, and to fret them, and to finally 
engulf them in the vortex of interest dues, 
but as a fortune that uplifts them and 
strengthens them; that houses them and 
clothes them ; that makes them the improvers 
of the soil, the undertakers of special enter- 
prise, the educators, the builders, and the 

SUSTAINERS OF THE NOBLER LIFE. 

It is not a lottery, in which the many 
lose that one may gain a prize, but a form 
of saving inspired by the holier aspirations 
of life, and equated with that mathematical 
certainty and equity which are the essential 
attributes of life insurance alone ; which 
blesses both in life and death, and while 
extending the asgis of its protection over 
the widow and orphan, makes a far larger 
number the beneficiaries of their own thrift, 
in an after life qualified for the enjoyment 
of a larger blessing. 



62 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

How vast is the dimension of this thrift 
you may read in the startling announcement 
that every year's contribution to the fund 
of it is an increasing one, and that every 
year's pledge as to the future of it is still 
a larger and a larger pledge, and that for 
the year just passed the bread-winners of 
the United States alone have pledged them- 
selves, through the instrumentality and un- 
tiring zeal of the life agent, to save the 
enormous sum of $1,000,000,000 during 
the next twenty years; and the sincerity 
of this undertaking on their part is shown 
in their having already begun it by mak- 
ing their first year's contribution to this 
sum. 

As I have before explained, this means 
an increased pecuniary circulation through 
the veins of human endeavor, taking first 
the form of death payments to the widow 
and orphan, and ultimately — as left in re- 
serve and to be loaned out to latent enter- 
prise under cover of safe investment, to be 
increased by the contingent profits of the 
company — a form of accumulations specifi- 
cally pledged for the protection of middle 
life and old age. 

Even now I might say, as summing up 
the benefits of the last fifty years, which 
is practically the span of its existence on 
this continent, there is scarcely a man or 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 63 

woman, and certainly not a child in sus- 
tained orphanage, that does not owe some- 
thing of his social status to the providence 
of the life company. 

But what of another fifty years ? Starting 
with its present means and organization, who 
can conceive of the record of life insurance 
that may be outlined on such an occasion 
as this ? During the last fifty years its oper- 
ations have spread in our midst as in no 
other part of the world, and the prosperity 
of America has exceeded in like ratio that 
of all other countries. 

In considering some of the phases of the 
good life insurance has wrought, or the 
good for which 

IT HAS LAID THE NEW FOUNDATION 

or sent out the inspiring force, let me tell 
you that it is within these fifty years that 
woman has come to be regarded as the 
equal of man. In the boasted days of 
chivalry she was the prize of battle. In 
all ages she has been the slave or bauble 
of the master-man, as she is yet, with the 
older races of the world, relegated to the 
domestic or the merely ornamental rela- 
tion of life. 

It is in America that woman found her 
first liberator, and as forced as some of 
you may regard the connection, I wish to 



64 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

add that it was here that the great expo- 
nent of persuasion was born — the modern 
life agent. [Applause.] 

It was here that he grew into the cru- 
sade of argument that has spread as a 
conquering force the world around. Before 
his time men courted woman, to be sure ; 
and fought for woman, and worked for 
woman; but it was the life agent who 
taught man so to live and die for woman 
that he should discharge to her sex the 
obligation of a thousand years of ill-repaid 
love, fidelity, and service. 

It was the life agent who stopped the 
mechanic at his labor, the merchant at his 
ledger, and the adventurer at the thresh- 
old of his voyage, and plead with him for 
the dependent wife and the young mother 
until the man's strong heart throbbed with 
the recollection of the betrothal kiss, and 
the native grandeur of the man's soul 
awoke to the consecration of an effort of 
self-denial which placed him in the list of 
woman's most noble champions. 

Steadily she has been enriched by the 
results of this divinely ordained service. 
Nobly she has reared her children with the 
aid of it, and to-day the American woman 
is the recognized standard-bearer of her 
sex the world around, as she is encouraged 
to look hopefully forward to be one day 



LIFE INSURANCE AND THE LIFE AGENT 65 

the recognized political, as she is now the 
social and intellectual, equal of man. 

In the crusade of life insurance it is the 
white cross alone that has been worn. It is 

THE GONFALON OF PEACE, 

only, that was borne aloft. No blood has 
flown at its behest; no martyr sacrificed to 
advance its cause. It has been the one 
mission of peace that has been a conqueror 
of peace; and to-day it is untiring in a 
common faith, as, gathered around a com- 
mon altar, it unites the good fathers and 
loving sons of the world — the strong, the 
generous, and the true — for the endow- 
ment of the generations to be. 

It is for such reasons, gentlemen, I claim 
for the life agent recognition as a public 
benefactor. He has been untiring, he has 
been zealous, he has been faithful. He 
has been patient, because he has had to 
deal with stubbornness and procrastination. 
He has been eloquent, because his heart 
and his conscience and his mind were a 
unit on his tongue. He has been suc- 
cessful because humanity is loving and 
lovable. His every effort increases the 
world's wealth; his every success knocks 
off some further shackle from the limbs 
of womanhood; his every victory gives 
to childhood a better world, and to old 
5 



66 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

age the larger guarantees of a peaceful 
end. 

Let me ask, then, is the institution of 
life insurance to be regarded as a business 
merely, and are we, its exponents, to be 
regarded in the community at large as but 
mere mercenaries ? 

Let me ask of you, my coworkers in the 
field, do you regard the mere pecuniary 
compensation of your work your sole or 
your sufficient recompense ? If the institu- 
tion were in danger of absolute extinction 
under conquest of some vandal host, would 
you not arm in its behalf, or, if your 
death could save it, would you not die in 
its defense? [Sensation and applause.] 

Gentlemen, this is my conception of the 
identities of life insurance and of the life 
agent who is worthy to be enrolled in its 
behalf. [Applause. ] 



[From Verbatim Reports — Union and Advertiser — Post Express — Extended Notices I 
Democrat and Chronicle, Herald and Times, Rochester, N. Y., Nov. 25, 1893.] 

ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 



{Portions of a Postprandial Address) 



Mr. Toastmaster and Gentlemen : — 

THOUGH SO flatteringly introduced and re- 
ceived as such, I understand full well 
that it is not myself that is your guest of 
guests to-night. It is not therefore as the 
individual that I shall apply the honor. 
You are, gentlemen, representative of the 
greater minds of this great city, and, as 
limited only by your numbers, of the great 
State itself. Yours are the positions that 
govern and defend, that create and sustain, 
that define and reflect the rights and lib- 
erties of the community. As I read your 
names erewhile, in the beautiful menu be- 
fore me, and gathered their significance in 
the personalities they symbolize, I was 
thrilled with the revelation. This is not a 
feast of bacchanalians, not a gathering of 

(67) 



68 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

political partisans, not a conclave of pro- 
fessions, not a delegation of a special in- 
terest or trade. Nor is it an assemblage 
that marks the chosen of any specific walk, 
and makes a common duty or a common 
undertaking the reason of its character or 
its numbers. You are here to-night as 
Americans, to sit in company with the 
genius that has made America the greatest 
country in the world. 

You are here as the honored among 
yourselves — the representatives of religion 
and sentiment, of intellect and worth; 
without purpose of profit, without aspira- 
tion of office, and without committal in 
common, save but that one instinct of the 
honorable, always, which would pay the 
tribute of honor where honor is deserved. 

We are not a people of moss-grown tra- 
ditions, or of hoary landmarks; with us 
there is but the laughing and rosy youth 
of national life. But a half cycle with man, 
or the institutions of man, is something of 
an age. For a man it means that turning 
point beyond which he either crystallizes 
into wisdom or into folly. The period of 
error and reform is past; from thence for- 
ward he will be as the flower ripened to its 
seed. Shall we not say that this is equally 
true of the institutions of man ? The human 
body is composed of so many atoms, indi- 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 69 

vidual in themselves, yet, as a v^hole, com- 
prising a distinct shape of infinitely blended 
parts, and a distinct individuality of radically 
divergent expression. The atoms composing 
this body are being constantly separated 
from it and new and stranger atoms incor- 
porated in their stead; and yet the body 
is, to all physical evidence, always the same 
and the characteristics of the individual 
unchanged. That which distinguished the 
one from the other remains; that quality 
which made the one greater than the other 
is still inherent; that undiscoverable some- 
thing which made the one noble in all 
things, and the other base, is still there. 
So it is with corporate existence made up 
of the aggregation of human lives; as 
was the germ of the one, so will there 
gather around it and crystallize in its 
structure those human aspirations and in- 
telligences which are found to be in sym- 
pathetic accord. 

I think it was a hundred and four years 
ago that Benjamin Franklin, conceiving the 
potency of interest compounded through a 
long period of years, and what a prodi- 
gious profit could be realized on capital so 
invested, conceived the plan of leaving five 
thousand dollars in trust for the benefit of 
the city of Boston, and a like sum for the 
benefit of the city of Philadelphia, to be 



70 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

held invested for a period of one hundred 
years, and the interest to be compounded 
annually. Calculating the investment at six 
per cent, per annum, he concluded that in 
the year 1889 there would be in the hands 
of each body of trustees some one million 
six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The 
board of trustees was to comprise the in- 
cumbents of the same official positions in 
both cities, and were selected for those 
probable abilities and virtues which their 
several offices would require. To him, 
valuing money as it was then valued, and 
in contrast with great wealths as then 
measured, this investment was to realize a 
vast sum and become potent for a social, 
if not a moral, reform. Well, the years 
passed, and the two investments matured, 
and the two bodies of men, equal in num- 
bers and presumably equal in mental and 
moral worth, with the same capital, start- 
ing into business the same year and with 
the same world before them, submitted the 
results of their stewardship. Boston had 
accumulated a fund of three hundred and 
thirty thousand dollars; Philadelphia had 
accumulated but something over seventy 
thousand. Shall we say the personalities 
constituting these two trusteeships could 
ever have run parallel ? This, then, has 
been my answer. The fact remains, we are 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS *Jl 

different and we differ, and our differences 
are the essential stimulants of life. 

It is a common experience of the life 
agent to encounter, in opposition, such 
arguments as these : ^^ I can invest my 
money as well as any corporation can in- 
vest it for me. I can get six, or seven, or 
eight, per cent.^^ (as the case may be); and 
thereupon they will figure out, as did the 
worthy Mr. Franklin, what the premium 
payment, as proposed by the agent, would 
come to if compounded at some one of 
these rates of interest for a period of years, 
and they will contrast the amount, so de- 
termined, as the cost, with the results as 
proposed in behalf of the insurance prop- 
osition. As in the case- of Mr. Franklin, 
the assumption is taken as a most literal 
fact that interest may be collected the 
moment it is due, that it may be invested 
again the moment it is collected and that 
there is no waste of time in the trans- 
action, when the fact is, that with all the 
perfection in organization and completeness 
of experience, and with all the perfection 
of machinery for developing borrowers, and 
collecting and re-investing interest, there 
is a loss in time of four years in forty-one, 
or nearly ten per cent. What the loss 
would be with the individual investor, and 
the individual investment, the results of the 



72 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

two investments of Mr. Franklin, and the 
significant margin between, plainly indicate. 

Again, in such an assumption, it is taken 
for granted that the satisfactory borrower 
can always be had; that this rate of in- 
terest can always be exacted; that when 
due it can always be collected; that the 
principal will always be repaid, and that 
no loss or failure can possibly intervene. 
Now the fact is that no individual can in- 
vest at compound interest ; that there is no 
law in the civilized world that provides 
for the collection of compound interest in 
the satisfaction of a debt ; and that making 
it a part of the contract between the bor- 
rower and the loaner in this State would 
declare it to be usury, and nullify the ob- 
ligation of repayment. In fact, I make the 
startling assertion that no one dollar has 
ever earned compound interest, at any rate, 
for any great length of time in the world's 
history. 

Years ago, a minister published the state- 
ment that a penny put out at interest at 
the birth of Christ, and annually com- 
pounded down to the year eighteen hun- 
dred and seventy, would amount to what 
he called the amazing sum of three hundred 
and thirty millions of dollars. Whereupon, 
one of my eminent actuarial brothers cor- 
rected the divine, and submitted for pub- 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 73 

lication in one of the insurance journals of 
the day, a statement giving a nearer ap- 
proach to what would, indeed, be the fact. 
He calculated that had one dollar been at 
six per cent, compound interest since the 
birth of Christ, and down to the beginning 
of that year, the sum would reach such a 
figure, considered as dollars, as to be 
beyond the grasp of the human under- 
standing, and, resolved into a new unit of 
value, would equal five and one-half quin- 
tillions of globes of solid gold equal in 
bulk to the earth. [Sensation.] Yet in 
those years of the youth of Christ, there 
were money loaners — for example, those 
of the Temple, who would have told the 
life agent, had he been an institution of 
that day, ^^We can invest our money our- 
selves. We are getting prodigious rates of 
interest; we can get two per cent, per 
month. ^^ And one might have said, ^^If I 
should invest but a single dollar for eigh- 
teen hundred and seventy years, at but 
six per cent, per annum, my heirs would 
realize a fortune of five and one-half quin- 
tillions of globes of solid gold equal in bulk 
to the earth. » Is it not a pity that some 
philanthropist of that day had not thought 
of a scheme of universal beneficence so sim- 
ple, and made us all joint heirs to such a 
fortune? [Laughter.] 



74 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

And so, again, of the error that has 
been and is still in men's mouths. One 
hundred and four years back, could Mr. 
Franklin have been interviewed by a life 
agent in that day, he would have been 
told by that wise man that he could create 
an investment company of his own, and 
that he could beat the insurance proposi- 
tion out of sight; for by an investment of 
$5,000 only, at six per cent, compound 
interest for one hundred years, he could 
leave to his heirs $1,650,000. Here there 
is to be seen, indeed, the difference be- 
tween theory and practice. For the Bos- 
ton investment, instead of one million six 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars there 
was realized three hundred and thirty 
thousand; and for the Philadelphia invest- 
ment, instead of realizing one million six 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars there 
was but the pitiable little showing of sev- 
enty thousand. This reminds me that the 
blood of Franklin still runs in the veins of 
men in the present day, for claimants have 
come forward as of his kin, for these two 
investments, and Philadelphia and Boston 
have both been enjoined from making any 
disposition of these funds ; and the drollery 
of it all lies in the further fact that the 
trustees of Philadelphia have been sued 
to account in their stewardship for the 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 75 

difference between these seventy thousand 
dollars and the one million six hundred 
and fifty thousand that was expected. 
[Laughter.] 

The fact is, the undertaking to earn in- 
terest compounded is a proposition of com- 
paratively recent years. The savings 
banks do not guarantee it, nor in fact any 
fixed rate of interest, for any fixed period 
of years. Theirs is a contract from year 
to year only. It is the life insurance com- 
panies alone that undertake this, and the 
companies of this State all calculate their 
contract liabilities on the assumption of 
earning for the policy holder on the net 
premium paid the rate of four per cent. 
per annum compounded; and this without 
loss of time, and without the loss supposed, 
of a dollar principal or interest. This is 
a form of contract obtainable at no other 
hands, and practicable with no other form 
"of enterprise; for this is the one sole busi- 
ness proposition founded on the bed-rock 
certainty of mathematics known to the 
civilized world, and the only monetary en- 
terprise absolutely beyond failure when 
honestly and intelligently conducted. 

I have been asked to voice the signifi- 
cance of this occasion. The task is a 
grateful one, but the inability to do the 
subject justice is more than a regret. As 



76 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

I look back at these fifty years, I am re- 
minded of the favorite line of Tennyson, 

" Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 

Gentlemen, we commemorate a shimmer 
of vast benignity which may be justly 
called the golden epoch in the world's life ; 
for, as yon will look back upon this night, 
and when it has become the perspective 
with advancing years, you will see that it 
had fitly rounded the first great stage in 
the progress of a world awakened from the 
lethargy of sensuality and conquest to the 
blessed life and light of liberty and hu- 
manity. Within these fifty years, the earth 
has poured out a stream of light that has 
encircled the seas and continents. It has 
harnessed the thunderbolt to transport our 
persons, to transmit our thoughts and to 
render our voices audible through vast 
distances. It has spanned the oceans, and 
explored their uttermost recesses; it has 
climbed the heavens and peered into the 
most amazing mysteries; it has stirred the 
tenderer depths of the heart, and awakened 
humanity as to a compassionate brother- 
hood; it has quickened the more subtle 
powers of the mind, and wrought for 
knowledge a universality and a soul. 

What will be the history of the next 
fifty years it is impossible to conjecture. 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 77 

Certainly, as an epoch, it must rest on dif- 
ferent lines. Certainly there is to be born 
the universal spirit; certainly there is to be 
hoped the universal good — when life will 
be literally, as the hours should typify to- 
night, a feast of reason and a flow of soul. 

So much, gentlemen, as respondent for 
the life company, and now I am sure you 
will be interested in something of a state- 
ment of the general facts of life insurance, 
as seen by the expert. 

There is something in the neighborhood 
of nine billions of money pledged in the 
nature of life insurance by the different 
life insurance companies and fraternal or- 
ganizations in the United States alone. 
This means that the more home-loving and 
ambitious portion of the American people 
have set themselves to earn and accumu- 
late, within a period of some twenty years, 
a principal of some nine billions, anticipat- 
ing a profit upon this of some four mil- 
lions more, and that during a period of 
twenty years (I am speaking now as tak- 
ing the probable average of the policy con- 
tracts as made), all that vast sum will 
have been created and distributed; all that 
vast sum will have been rescued by the 
persistent zeal of the life agent, from im- 
provident waste or needless expenditure, 
and piled up as a nation's wealth and its 



78 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

children's increasing patrimony. But this 
is not the fixed amount; this is but the 
statement in balance, as it were, for the 
day. Every year a portion is being dis- 
tributed by death and contract maturity, 
to widows, to dependent age, to orphans, 
and to charitable and scholastic institutions; 
and every year the bulk is not only being 
added to by those who are being insured 
later, but is being yearly increased; for 
every year a larger percentage of the com- 
munity of ambitious endeavor awake to an 
understanding and appreciation of the in- 
trinsic merits of this great proposition, and 
every year a larger and larger percentage 
of those already insured take on a still 
larger contract of obligation, determining 
to provide still larger guarantees against 
the dependency of their loved ones, and 
their own possible dependency in the 
years to come. 

Gentlemen, life insurance, considered in 
the light of an operative beneficence as a 
pledge of any considerable magnitude, be- 
longs to the epoch I have just described. 
Fifty years ago but few people sought to 
insure their lives, and the few who thought 
of it did so more in the nature of a wager 
or a gamble with chance. Within the last 
twenty-five years, it has spread as a revela- 
tion of Providence the world around, and 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 79 

where years ago its zealous exponent would 
have been regarded in the nature of a bore 
and a person to be shunned, he is now, as 
we perceive to-night, the honored in all 
the more popular walks of life. With this 
epoch I consider the principle to have 
reached its fullest and most perfect ex- 
pression. As a professional actuary, and 
as the consistent advocate of the invest- 
ment thesis of life insurance, perhaps it 
would be in character for me to say that 
I can conceive of no essential element that 
awaits as yet the further discovery or ap- 
plication to perfect the proposition as now 
presented. The policy contract with the 
more popular companies has become ex- 
tremely simple; the restrictions almost 
nominal ; the stability beyond question, and 
the advantages sure. 

There is, however, to be understood a 
broad distinction in the proposition as pre- 
sented by the different companies. In its 
earlier years this was confined to the guar- 
antee of a payment of a sum of money at 
death only; yet, by a perversion of terms, 
it was called life insurance. By way of 
contradistinction, I now designate that plan 
of the insurance undertaking which merely 
provides.for the possible widow and orphan 
as ^^ Death Insurance, ^^ because ^^Life Insur- 
ance^^ now means, in my thesis, insuring 



80 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the life, for the benefit of the life, during 
the entirety of the life itself. In this con- 
nection, I should tell you that the benefit 
orders insure against death only, and that 
this is equally true of all the cooperative 
and assessment companies; but as I do not 
wish to appear to-night as the partisan, I 
will go out of my way to say that together 
these bodies have undertaken the payment 
of nearly four billion and a half of dollars 
by way of death insurance to the widow 
and orphan — a colossal, a tremendous fact, 
and not to be decried. In the presentation 
of their claims to consideration, however, 
they employ the term ^^life insurance, ^^ and 
that, too, even when in competition with 
companies whose every plan is now to in- 
sure the life for the benefit of itself; and 
it is only fair, therefore, to all, that this 
distinction should be made clearer, and 
that as with these cooperatives, or friendly 
associations, and with the old-time plans 
of some of the regular companies, it should 
be shown that a challenge of comparative 
merit or cost could not hold as between 
plans that insure in both life and death, 
and those that provide for death alone, save 
as this difference had its due consideration. 
But, gentlemen, let us consider for a 
moment life insurance as a social factor. 
Do you know that the percentage of de- 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 51 

pendent childhood has diminished amaz- 
ingly in the last decade? Do you know 
that there are only eighteen thousand 
children in the care of the charitable and 
correction institutions of the whole Empire 
State ? And do you know that but a 
small percentage of those are being cared 
for as the homeless orphans ? That the 
greater number of them are the waifs 
rescued more by the intervention of the 
courts from vicious haunts and brutal par- 
ents ? Suppose all this vast machinery for 
the transmission of the moneys earned by 
"he living into bequests for the orphan 
were to be blotted out of society as now 
constructed, what would be the condition 
of things ten years hence, think you? Do 
you not see that the charitable institutions 
would be crowded ? That the orphan asy- 
lums would be filled everywhere to reple- 
tion ? And that, instead of the pretty 
homes and well-dressed putative mothers, 
and neatly-attired children, with the kin- 
dergartens, and graded schools, and play- 
rooms, and all the present money-secured 
conditions of health, and those love-sown 
recollections of after years that carry back 
to childhood as to the lost fragrance of 
life, do you not see that instead of all this 
we should go back to the old parochial 

system? To the negligence that crowds 
6 



82 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

beget, and to the scarcity, and to the 
sterility of all things that signalize the 
poor! [Sensation.] 

Let me tell you that four ladies, living 
as neighbors in one of the bright towns of 
Wisconsin, proposed to adopt four children. 
They made known their wants to several 
institutions, and they wrote to a lady in 
Milwaukee, known for her life-long identity 
with orphan work. Their letter to her got 
into the papers, and these vied with each 
other in giving publicity to the fact in 
great headlines, ^^ Wanted to adopt, Four 
Children. ^^ Gentlemen, they never received 
a single response. No mother was found 
so poor that she was willing to part with 
her child, and no child left so completely 
an orphan that there was not insiirance 
money enough, somewhere, to rear it and 
provide it a home, or was not required by 
some orphan asylum, as a sort of stock in 
trade, to maintain the show of their benefi- 
cence. The same is true of the widow of 
our land. Where is she now found as a fac- 
tor of dependence, except in some strangely 
isolated case ? Thanks to the indefatiga- 
ble labors of the life agent — that science- 
ordained preacher from the text of life — 
she is spared the suttee of her moral na 
ture, and the orphan the contamination of 
poverty and vice. 



ANNIVERSARY OF FIFTY YEARS 83 

But there is still the problem of the old 
man. Shall I tell you that dependent age 
is the widowhood of youth ? That for such 
a widowhood there is no ray of hope what- 
ever? The youth that should have made 
generous provision for such a hopeless fate 
is gone. The smooth cheek, the bright 
eye, the strong limb, the dauntless spirit 
that wooed dame Fortune, only to waste her 
favors in the prodigal enjoyments of the 
hour, comes to himself again, after a lapse 
of weary years, as the widow, in worse 
than poverty, as the orphan, in worse than 
rags ; for the widow may one day be rescued 
by her grown-up children, and the orphan 
will dream, even in the lap of want, of the 
manhood or womanhood that is to come, 
gilded with all the sweet illusions of youth, 
and fragrant with the beautiful flowers of 
romance, to make life one long summer of 
enchantment. 

The Emperor Napoleon the Third en- 
nobled the three men who had been in- 
strumental in establishing and popularizing 
life insurance in France, and in that coun- 
try there are still institutions whose special 
province it appears to be to single out 
merit and award it the distinction of a 
mark before men. There is no such func- 
tion discharged by such a set of men in 
this country. With us, it is the duty of 



84 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the people. As individuals we praise or 
blame; as newspapers we honor or con- 
demn; as a community we accept or reject; 
while we are taught to seek, as but to be 
found within, for the honor of all honors 
— the glorification of self in the knowledge 
of a praise deserved, or a deed all-worthy. 
[Applause.] 

For myself, there are those men in the 
service who have been the several idols in 
the devotional sides of my endeavor. Gen- 
tlemen, I pity him who has no idol wor- 
ship in his soul; who can see in no man 
or woman of his acquaintance the sem^ 
blance of the god-like or of the spiritual. 
When the last of such idols shall have 
tumbled from its niche with me, I shall feel 
that it is myself that is in ruins and that the 
world is without a god. 

Gentlemen, I commend to you my idols. 
[Applause.] 



[Frmi Verbatim Reports ef the DaUy Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, TJie 
Australian Star, The Australian Insurance and Banking Record.^ 

THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 

(Title and Abbreviated Introduction by the Editor) 



{Portions of an After Banquet Speech iii Sydney, 

]Sf, S. W.— October ij, 1892 — The Local 

and Personal Portions Omitted^ 



^n^HE Chairman y in a feiiu graceful sen- 
tences, proposed the toast of ^^Our Guest^^ 
— Mr, William P, Stewart, of New York. 

On arising, Mr. Stewart was received with 
a hearty welcome of applaicse. In reply {after 
a general compliment to the occasion and a 
graceful tribute to the eminent character of 
the guests assembled to do him honor, and an 
inspiring reference to Australia) he said: — 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : I shall carry 
away an aching heart when I go, because 
of the tender memories that have been en- 
gendered by my visit here, and the regrets 
that will never cease with me because of 

(85) 



86 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the great distance that must forever sepa- 
rate our lives. But, gentlemen, I have not 
been an onlooker in Venice merely. I did 
not come here to say, ^^ How do you do ? ^^ 
to be feted and go my way. We Ameri- 
cans need to know more of your country. 
[Applause.] We need to know it, not as 
from the lips of traveling gossips, or from 
the publications of a people's foibles. We 
all have our faults. Would we be human 
if we had them not? And if we were not 
human would we be here tonight ? [Laugh- 
ter and applause.] 

For myself, I love to feel as an optimist 
wholly. [Hear, hear!] I love to think 
of the sun as shining steadily behind the 
curtain of the darkest day. [Applause.] I 
love to think that before we can get to 
the dregs of the wine we must drink or 
waste a generous vintage. I know the most 
beautiful flowers have the ugliest roots, 
but I am not here to make a collection 
of roots ; I hope to carry away the fragrance 
of your flowers only — [Cheers. ] — for I love 
those builder instincts of nature which 
strive always to make of the desert a turf 
of perpetual green. [Cheers.] I have en- 
deavored to learn from yourselves your con- 
ception of yourselves and of your country, 
as going to the fountain-head for the sub- 
stantial truth. I have endeavored to sit at 



rw 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 87 

the feet of your great men and to qualify 
myself to reflect their views abroad. If 
your people do not profit by the result of 
these studies it will be either the fault of 
my opportunity or my stupidity of method 
that will abort one of the primary objects 
of my visit to Australia. 

Mr. Stewart was asked to take as the sub- 
ject of his response to the hospitalities of the 
night — the U7iderlyi?zg principle of his own 
profession — and he gave it as 

<<THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION. ^^ 

Gentlemen, in my mind, this principle 
[Equation] is the grandest discovery of hu- 
man relation that has ever yet been made, 
and I believe it is yet to solve the more 
difficult problems of the social structure, 
and to be recognized as of a wider appli- 
cation, and of a more benignant potency, 
than is commonly dreamed of. But perhaps 
a few of you here to-night, on the first 
flush of this statement, will not understand 
my meaning, and in what manner the sim- 
ple word ^^ equation ^^ expresses a principle 
so potent, and of such wide application 
and virtue. In a few short paragraphs I 
will indicate its larger functions, in the 
autonomy of civilization, as they are already 



88 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

known and respected; and on learning of 
these, I am sure you will catch something 
of my enthusiasm in respect to it, and come 
to something of my prophetic faith as to 
its future usefulness and significance. 

On one occasion I was looking at a house 
in process of erection, and I saw three 
boys — as boys will — risking their lives at 
play in an effort to walk on the narrow 
fioor-beams of an upper story before the 
flooring had been laid on. If one of them 
had undertaken to stand upon one of those 
slender joists alone, and without support 
at hand, it would have meant almost cer- 
tain death to him, for the slightest sway- 
ing from the perpendicular would have 
cast him to the depths below; but what 
did the older one do — perhaps the born 
leader of the three? He directed that they 
should each walk on adjoining beams, he 
in the center, and holding the one on either 
side by the hand. In this manner they 
passed safely from the one side of the build- 
ing to the other. [Cheers. ] In this manner 
the swaying of the one was checked by 
the resistance of the other two, and the 
confidence begotten of this intuitive wis- 
dom — which was here to them a power — 
made them fearless and sure-footed. Gen- 
tlemen, this is Life Insurance in its primary 
conception — the equation of numbers as 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION oQ 

supplementing the strength and the wisdom 
of the one. [Cheers.] 

As another illustration I will recite to 
you a circumstance which happened to a 
party of friends who undertook to climb 
the Alps. As you know, the plan followed 
in climbing those mountains is to secure 
the aid of careful and experienced guides; 
and the manner of these guides, in con- 
ducting a party of tourists up those ice 
declivities, is to attach them by strong belts 
to a rope, so many feet apart, and then to 
securely fasten the ends of this rope to 
their own belts. In the affair referred 
to, in attempting to cross a narrow chasm 
in the ice, one of the tourists lost his foot- 
ing and fell into the opening, to certain 
death, had it not been for the wise pre- 
cautions of the guides, and the resisting 
strength of those who were linked to him 
by the principle of equation, which made 
that rope the instantly outstretched hand 
of rescue, nerved with the united strength 
and sure-footedness of the remaining group ; 
for immediately there was the instinctive 
bracing of the Alpine stocks, there was the 
moment's holding of the breath as the 
weight of the falling comrade was felt as 
a sudden tug at the belt, resisted as by a 
common impulse, to feel the after glad 
throbbing of the heart with the realization 



90 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

of its effectiveness. [Applause.] Then came 
the cautious uplifting of the suspended 
comrade, his white face appearing above 
the edge of the ice chasm, his outstretched 
hands clasped by those of the sturdy- 
guide, whose body lies prone upon the ice, 
and partly projected over the appalling 
abyss. A moment more and he who had 
been thus sepulchered stood upright in their 
midst in the joyful consciousness of succor, 
and with a grateful ^^ Thank God ^^ upon 
his lips. Gentlemen, this is ^^ mutual pro- 
tection,^^ a synonym of ^^ Life Insurance, ^^ 
and another illustration of the principle 
which I honor — equation. [Cheers.] 

There was a time in the world's history 
when it had no commerce worthy of the name. 
The ships that went out from any port went 
as individual ventures. Around these ven- 
tures there often clustered the confidence of 
many, and perhaps the welfare of a town or 
city. If a storm overtook one of these ships, 
and it was swallowed up by the depths of 
the ocean, it generally took with it the for- 
tune of some adventurous spirit, to ruin him, 
perhaps, and to destroy his usefulness for 
the balance of his life; and often a great 
storm at sea would cast away the several 
ships of a single port, and impoverish its 
community for years to come. In all this 
there was but a wild gambling with the 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 91 

caprices of nature. It was depending fre- 
quently as upon a single throw of dice. If 
the venture was fortunate, great profit was 
the result — as in all gambling the margins 
of contingency are great — but if the venture 
failed, there was a corresponding loss. No- 
body could safely borrow upon the certainty 
of a ship's coming back ; nobody could guar- 
antee another on the mere fact of his hav- 
ing a ship at sea. But it came to be seen, as 
the instinctive wisdom of this wonderful 
sentiency of ours, that of all the ships that 
were sent to sea, in any one year, the larger 
number of them returned, and that, there- 
fore, if they could be joined together as in a 
single partnership, a division of profits could 
then become general and assured; for the 
loss of single ships might then be regarded 
as some portion only of the cost of the 
general venture. From this thought came 
to be established what is now known as Ma- 
rine Insurance — [Cheers. ] — a strikingly op- 
portune and potent application of this great 
principle — equation. In this manner com- 
merce, and the thousand and one industries 
which it inspired, was guaranteed a protec- 
tion as strong as the everlasting hills, and 
was given an incentive that has made it 
the benefactor of the world, the annihilator 
of its distances, and the opener-up of its re- 
motest confines. [Cheers.] Thus confidence 



92 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

was begotten as between distant communi- 
ties. Thus a world's trust was engendered, 
a world's comfort exchanged, and a world- 
wide comity incepted. [Cheers.] 

Again, there was a time when the proper- 
ties and fortunes on land had no assured 
value; when no man could retire to his 
couch at night, and wake up in the morning 
wi'th the certainty that he possessed any- 
thing; for the demon of conflagration, in 
the dark watches of the night, might have 
reduced his all to ashes. No house, no 
workshop, no factory, no stock of goods, in 
storage or in transit, could be regarded as 
property upon which a man might guar- 
antee the keeping of his own commercial 
pledge, or insure the keeping of the pledges 
of another. When a man's property was 
destroyed, his only resource was to go 
begging among his neighbors; and he 
and his particular acquaintances would go 
with their hats in their hands, soliciting 
from their common neighbors the means to 
restore his loss, or to partially reestablish 
him. In those days debt was a terrible 
thing, and the vicissitudes of property ap- 
palling and annihilating. Fortunes were 
limited to circumscribed areas. Cosmopoli- 
tanism was everywhere unknown as a visit- 
ant to the rural centers. Then came again 
this genius of sentiency — ^^ equation, ^^ and 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 93 

with the tip of its potent wand changed all 
this. [Cheers.] The merchant was taught 
to enter as into a general partnership, as of 
merchants with merchants, and to pay into 
a ^^ general ^^ fund, as a tax upon his individ- 
ual profits, the cost of a community-pledge 
that would insure to each one always the in« 
destructibility of his stock, and the certainty 
of having those means in secure possession 
upon which he might venture the creation of 
a business debt. [Applause.] This form of 
partnership, gentlemen, is known as ^^ Fire 
Insurance, ^^ and is a still farther, and a still 
more potent, application of the principle I 
honor — equation. [Applause.] Upon this 
principle, as thus applied, as upon a basis sub- 
concreted over all the quicksands of in divid- 
ual undertaking and activity, has been erected 
the most powerful means of commercial ex- 
tension and individual enlargement ever 
dreamt of in the mind of man — I speak 
now of ^^ commercial credit. ^^ [Cheers.] 
For in this manner, for the first time in the 
world's history, property came to have as 
its synonym ^^ guaranteeism *^ — [Applause. ] — 
and all financial undertakings a basis of se- 
curity, and all ambitious life the means of a 
social advancement. [Cheers.] 

Then came the third, and so far the more 
wonderful, application of this principle, since 
applied in hundreds of minor conceptions of 



94 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

mutual security, or mutual benefit, and the 
honor of this is to be awarded to England; 
and all its breadth of extension and its per- 
fectibility of plan to the genius and energy 
of the English-speaking race. A few gener- 
ations back nothing was secured, as property 
upon land or sea, or as stored up in the 
energies of life. Love, itself, was a most 
reckless gambler. It dreamed of home as a 
literal earthly heaven, only to wake up in 
the embrace of death, and to find itself in 
widow's weeds and in the black dress of 
the orphan, and, later on, in the tatters 
of the pauper and the outcast waif. When 
the ambitious and genius-lighted man, with 
the living instincts of God within his heart, 
and the desire to propagate his species as a re- 
ligious inspiration, when he took unto himself 
the comfort of a dear woman's love, he had 
always that one dread and portentous thought 
within his mind — darkening the days before 
him, and clouding over the bright sky, and 
making ever the green landscape around the 
inspiration of a bitter regret — he might die 
at any moment ; in the midst of his employ- 
ments, while striving for the comfort and 
happiness of his dear ones, in the very arms 
of his beloved, his more than life — his wife — 
he might die. Then all the bright world for 
them would go down with him to the grave — 
the grave that he would willingly have 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 95 

sought if it were thus to have been made the 
endowment of his dear ones and the gift to 
them of an assured comfort. But here again, 
this genius of the world — Equatmi — touched 
with its all-potent wand the rock of igno- 
rance and despair, and straightway the provi- 
dence of God was revealed upon earth and 
centered in the citadel of life — its heart. 
[Applause.] Men were asked to join in a 
living compact, fixing a set value to their 
lives, and to lay aside a definite part of their 
earnings to provide a definite money-indem- 
nity to the bereaved family when its bread- 
winner should be called hence. To the 
establishment of this proposition, civilization, 
as we understand it and appreciate it to-day, 
owes its greatest and grandest factor — Life 
Insurance — [Applause. ] — and to this its far- 
ther and higher reaches of success. [Cheers. ] 
In this manner human life came to be in- 
vested with a financial basis, and man to be 
regarded as possessing not only a social but 
a trade value, and to be, in his productive 
ability, a legal property; and this, when 
guaranteed by association and joined to indi- 
vidual character, has now come to be re- 
garded and accepted as the basis for a 
sound specific credit. [Applause.] 

In recent years, in my judgment, a still 
more benignant phase of this principle has 
been applied. I refer to the system by 



96 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

which old age is had in thought, and its in- 
tegrity assured. [Hear, hear!] For twenty- 
two years I have been influenced but by the 
one aspiration, and that is to make the term 
^^ life insurance ^^ literally mean the insur- 
ance of life, for the benefit of life, to the end 
of life. [ Hear, hear ! ] I am proud to say, 
gentlemen, that my efforts in this direction 
have been crowned with a signal success; 
and I believe to-day there is no portion of 
the civilized world but that is being taught 
the virtues of this latter provision, as Amer- 
ica's crowning contribution to the science of 
equation. 

If you will consider, gentlemen, that of a 
thousand young men, at the age of twenty- 
five, there will be about six hundred of them 
alive at the age of sixty-five, and that only 
four hundred, during a period of forty years, 
will have passed away in death, you will 
begin to appreciate my meaning when I 
say that I want ^Hife insurance ^^ to insure 
^^life^^; for here are fifty per cent, more 
living at the threshold of old age, dead to 
the activities of the world, and as the depend- 
ents of their former manhood, than have 
been carried to the grave in the interim of 
all their years of active life. 

Of the four hundred — the forty per cent, 
that has passed away in the long period of 
forty years — how many of them, think you, 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 97 

will have been married at all ? And if mar- 
ried, how many will survive their wives, or 
their wives survive them ? How many will 
have children at all ? And how many will 
leave wives or children as utterly dependent 
upon their insurance policies ? This is a 
matter-of-fact way of putting it, and the 
substantial answer is found in the queries 
themselves. 

But of the six hundred old men in the 
thousand, who will live, how many will need 
protection, will be dependent upon the past ? 
You may safely say every ' one of them. 
They will all have to lay up for that epoch in 
life ; they will all have to make provision for 
the winter of existence of which that age 
may be called the threshold. If they have 
not done it, theirs is a pitiable condition, for 
their lot is then absolutely without hope. In 
the mind of childhood there never can come 
the cark of care. It cannot realize what is 
meant by poverty — hopeless and unending. 
For it the skies are always bright ; to it the 
world is beautiful — the wonderland of expec- 
tation and surprise; around it will cluster 
the flowers of affection; compassion will 
bend to it, pity weep with it, love will come 
to it, and friendship grow with it. All this 
is the patrimony of 3^outh. But how differ- 
ent is this with old age ? The very look of 
itself, reflected from any mirror, is a discour- 
7 



98 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

agement. Its very latest expressions have 
been but a cruel mockery of the past. Youth 
passes it, beauty ignores it, and the great 
life of the day disregards it. For youth the 
horizon is constantly broadening to a hope- 
depicted future of greatness and plenty. To 
age the horizon is daily narrowing with 
a chillier and chillier atmosphere, and a 
deeper impending gloom, until the limits of 
the grave become its literal confinements. 
Of all this six hundred old men, how many 
will have wives who will have grown old and 
dependent with them ? How many will have 
children that were born failures, or have been 
the subsequent victims of the accidents of 
life, or its disappointments in the domain 
of endeavor ? 

Do you not see, gentlemen, there are two 
distinct sides to this assurance of human life ? 
During the whole of my professional career, 
while recognizing the value of the death 
insurance provision — hitherto paradoxically 
called the ^^ife insurance policy ^^ — I have 
battled for a recognition of the old man, and 
of the old wife, and the decrepid grown-up 
children of a miscarried existence — [Hear, 
hear!] — and I say to you, as the corol- 
lary of this, that from the date of my visit 
in your midst, you will hear more of what 
we understand as ^< life insurance. ^^ [Ap- 
plause.] 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 99 

And now a word or two in general. Few 
people have a supposition of what life insur- 
ance means, as an undertaking, in this age of 
ours. 

The total amount guaranteed by the 
many established companies of the world is 
over six billions of dollars, and of the bene- 
fit orders there are assurances, or burial 
pledges, to something over four billions 
more. Thus, to mature within the limits of 
the present generation of adult life, say, as 
an average of the contract terms within the 
next twenty years, undertakings have been 
entered into, in the name of life insurance, 
by the more prudent and the more loving of 
the world of endeavor, to save ten billions 
of dollars, or two billions of pounds, and to 
distribute this vast sum in the proportions 
due, from business center to business center, 
from town to village, and from palace to hut, 
in this the one sole universal spread or di- 
vision of wealth that is operative or con- 
ceivably practicable ; and this as the current 
savings of ambitious labor, regularly put 
away in the faith born of this great princi- 
ple, to be ultimately distributed as the 
waters from a great reservoir to freshen life 
over a vast plain. I say, then, gentlemen, 
Equation, in its socio-economic sense, is the 
providence of God, as revealed to, and made 
operative by, man; and the holy of holies 



100 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

in the world of all, considered as God's uni- 
versal temple. [Applause.] 

Gentlemen, a few words concerning the 
life agent and I am done. I have not in- 
tended that my discourse should be tech- 
nical. Perhaps some of you thought I was 
about to bore you in this way, and I have no 
doubt that the gentlemen who requested — 
two of your prominent legislators, if you 
will — that I would make some talk on this 
subject, supposed that I might so afflict 
them. If so, I hope they are now taking 
a deep breath. 

THE LIFE INSURANCE AGENT 

To the life agent, in the literal sense, I at- 
tribute the modern spread of life insurance ; 
and when I say ^^ modern ^^ I mean specially 
the last twenty-five years, for beyond that 
the entire history of life insurance would be 
regarded as a mere bagatelle in comparison. 
Before that it was a moral sentiment, an 
appeal to a religious duty, a chanting of the 
funeral dirges of death, and the depictment 
of a weeping widow and a wondering child- 
hood. It was not productive of much en- 
thusiasm on the part of the public; but 
the wiser plans, and the agents more of the 
earth earthy, have brought this subject to 
be regarded in an exceedingly popular light. 
By their persistent efforts the stubbornly- 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION lOI 

Opposed have been brought to yield a willing 
consent, the ignorant have been enlight- 
ened, the improvident have been made wise, 
the dead of heart have been brought to a 
show of sympathy and affection. 

I regard the work of the life agent as of 
the most stupendous import, as of the most 
far-reaching benignity. I give him no 
second place. He has been the missionary 
. and the colporteur of a proposition that has 
rescued countless lives from degradation 
and the threat of crime, to be the sustain- 
ing elements in the greatest moral force 
the world has ever known — the conscious- 
ness of the means of providence, applicable 
and operative on earth. 

The life insurance agent has brought 
humanity as within the charmed circle of 
a God-incepted fraternity — the only univer- 
sal brotherhood the world has ever known, 
the only one calculated to be successful, to 
be permanent, and all-uniting. 

The life insurance agent has been as con- 
scientious as his prototype in any other walk 
of life. He has been as hard-working, and 
as little compensated as a whole. Unaffect- 
edly he has preached his gospel in the marts 
of trade, at the street corners, at the cross- 
roads, and along the byways of life, in its 
homes, and in its public temples. 

Take from life insurance its life agent, and 



102 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the proposition would be as dead, as to any 
general effectiveness, as would the Christian 
faith if you stripped it of its priesthood. 
Men, believing in the good of it all, would 
procrastinate in the doing of it, until death 
or disaster made the application of the bene- 
fits of life insurance impossible. 

Gentlemen, I have done. [General ap- 
plause.] 



[From a speech made in Melbourne, from Table Talk, December 9, 1892.] 

THE BASIS OF THE LIFE INSUR- 
ANCE CONTRACT 



{Extract from an After Dinner Address) 



The basis of the life insurance contract is 
the pledge of industry, that a part of its 
current production shall be saved for a cer- 
tain number of years, or until a specified 
bulk sum has been accumulated. From this 
you will perceive that a life office is first a 
savings bank, over the deposits of which 
death is proportionately equated, and the 
general profits of the undertaking equitably 
divided. [ Hear, hear ! ] Thus you will see 
the moneys paid into a life office are not as 
sums to be dissipated in expense, or to be 
eaten up by the cost of some present benefit. 
Every fresh contract means an undertaking 
on the part of some individual to place him- 
self one day beyond want if he lives, or his 
family beyond immediate want if he dies. 
It is also a pledge to the community that he 
is, to the extent of such savings, yearly 
increasing the general wealth of his country, 
and putting so much of the profits of the 
hour beyond the allurements of chance and 

(103) 



104 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the disposition to indulgence and waste. 
[Hear, hear!] Once committed through 
the intelligent and zealous labors of the life 
agent, the policy holder enters the ranks 
of thrift, as one in the God-inspired army of 
all-conquering virtue. [Applause.] 

A life office is, therefore, to be regarded as 
the embodiment of the noblest aspirations 
of man, and as the consecration of so much 
of his earnings to the future of life and to 
the betterment of the growing generation. 
[ Hear, hear ! ] A single glance at this 
proposition will suffice you to see that the 
popularization of the insurance idea means 
a larger individual and national prosperity; 
means the lessening of poverty and crime; 
means a wider intelligence and purer faith; 
and that to interpose any obstacle in the way, 
or to discourage its beneficiaries by special 
impositions of the State, would be like tax- 
ing knowledge at the fountain-head, religion 
at the altar, and the milk of life as it is ex- 
pressed at the mother's breast. [Applause.] 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 97 

will have been married at all ? And if mar- 
ried, how many will survive their wives, or 
their wives survive them ? How many will 
have children at all ? And how many will 
leave wives or children as utterly dependent 
upon their insurance policies ? This is a 
matter-of-fact way of putting it, and the 
substantial answer is found in the queries 
themselves. 

But of the six hundred old men in the 
thousand, who will live, how many will need 
protection, will be dependent upon the past ? 
You may safely say every one of them. 
They will all have to lay up for that epoch in 
life ; they will all have to make provision for 
the winter of existence of which that age 
may be called the threshold. If they have 
not done it, theirs is a pitiable condition, for 
their lot is then absolutely without hope. In 
the mind of childhood there never can come 
the cark of care. It cannot realize what is 
meant by poverty — hopeless and unending. 
For it the skies are always bright ; to it the 
world is beautiful — the wonderland of expec- 
tation and surprise; around it will cluster 
the flowers of affection; compassion will 
bend to it, pity weep with it, love will come 
to it, and friendship grow with it. All this 
is the patrimony of 3^outh. But how differ- 
ent is this with old age ? The very look of 
itself, reflected from any mirror, is a discour- 
7 



95 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

agement. Its very latest expressions have 
been but a cruel mockery of the past. Youth 
passes it, beauty ignores it, and the great 
life ©f the day disregards it. For youth the 
horizon is constantly broadening to a hope- 
depicted future of greatness and plenty. To 
age the horizon is daily narrowing with 
a chillier and chillier atmosphere, and a 
deeper impending gloom, until the limits of 
the grave become its literal confinements. 
Of all this six hundred old men, how many 
will have wives who will have grown old and 
dependent with them ? How many will have 
children that were born failures, or have been 
the subsequent victims of the accidents of 
life, or its disappointments in the domain 
of endeavor ? 

Do you not see, gentlemen, there are two 
distinct sides to this assurance of human life ? 
During the whole of my professional career, 
while recognizing the value of the death 
insurance provision — hitherto paradoxically 
called the ^Hife insurance policy ^^ — I have 
battled for a recognition of the old man, and 
of the old wife, and the decrepid grown-up 
children of a miscarried existence — [ Hear, 
hear!] — and I say to you, as the corol- 
lary of this, that from the date of my visit 
in your midst, you will hear more of what 
we understand as ^^life insurance. ^^ [Ap- 
plause.] 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION 99 

And now a word or two in general. Few 
people have a supposition of what life insur- 
ance means, as an undertaking, in this age of 
ours. 

The total amount guaranteed by the 
many established companies of the world is 
over six billions of dollars, and of the bene- 
fit orders there are assurances, or burial 
pledges, to something over four billions 
more. Thus, to mature within the limits of 
the present generation of adult life, say, as 
an average of the contract terms within the 
next twenty years, undertakings have been 
entered into, in the name of life insurance, 
by the more prudent and the more loving of 
the world of endeavor, to save ten billions 
of dollars, or two billions of pounds, and to 
distribute this vast sum in the proportions 
due, from business center to business center, 
from town to village, and from palace to hut, 
in this the one sole universal spread or di- 
vision of wealth that is operative or con- 
ceivably practicable ; and this as the current 
savings of ambitious labor, regularly put 
away in the faith born of this great princi- 
ple, to be ultimately distributed as the 
waters from a great reservoir to freshen life 
over a vast plain. I say, then, gentlemen, 
Equation, in its socio-economic sense, is the 
providence of God, as revealed to, and made 
operative by, man; and the holy of holies 

LofC. 



100 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

in the world of all, considered as God's uni- 
versal temple. [Applause.] 

Gentlemen, a few words concerning the 
life agent and I am done. I have not in- 
tended that my discourse should be tech- 
nical. Perhaps some of you thought I was 
about to bore you in this way, and I have no 
doubt that the gentlemen who requested — 
two of your prominent legislators, if you 
will — that I would make some talk on this 
subject, supposed that I might so afflict 
them. If so, I hope they are now taking 
a deep breath. 

THE LIFE INSURANCE AGENT 

To the life agent, in the literal sense, I at- 
tribute the modern spread of life insurance ; 
and when I say ^^ modern ^^ I mean specially 
the last twenty-five years, for beyond that 
the entire history of life insurance would be 
regarded as a mere bagatelle in comparison. 
Before that it was a moral sentiment, an 
appeal to a religious duty, a chanting of the 
funeral dirges of death, and the depictment 
of a weeping widow and a wondering child- 
hood. It was not productive of much en- 
thusiasm on the part of the public; but 
the wiser plans, and the agents more of the 
earth earthy, have brought this subject to 
be regarded in an exceedingly popular light. 
By their persistent efforts the stubbornly- 



THE PROVIDENCE OF EQUATION lOI 

opposed have been brought to yield a willing 
consent, the ignorant have been enlight- 
ened, the improvident have been made wise, 
the dead of heart have been brought to a 
show of sympathy and affection. 

I regard the work of the life agent as of 
the most stupendous import, as of the most 
far-reaching benignity. I give him no 
second place. He has been the missionary 
and the colporteur of a proposition that has 
rescued countless lives from degradation 
and the threat of crime, to be the sustain- 
ing elements in the greatest moral force 
the world has ever known — the conscious- 
ness of the means of providence, applicable 
and operative on earth. 

The life insurance agent has brought 
humanity as within the charmed circle of 
a God-incepted fraternity — the only univer- 
sal brotherhood the world has ever known, 
the only one calculated to be successful, to 
be permanent, and all-uniting. 

The life insurance agent has been as con- 
scientious as his prototype in any other walk 
of life. He has been as hard-working, and 
as little compensated as a whole. Unaffect- 
edly he has preached his gospel in the marts 
of trade, at the street corners, at the cross- 
roads, and along the byways of life, in its 
homes, and in its public temples. 

Take from life insurance its life agent, and 



102 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the proposition would be as dead, as to any 
general effectiveness, as would the Christian 
faith if yon stripped it of its priesthood. 
Men, believing in the good of it all, would 
procrastinate in the doing of it, until death 
or disaster made the application of the bene- 
fits of life insurance impossible. 

Gentlemen, I have done. [General ap- 
plause.] 



IFram a speech made in Melbourne, from Table Talk, December 9, 1892.] 

THE BASIS OF THE LIFE INSUR- 
ANCE CONTRACT 



{Extract fro77i an After Dinner Address) 



The- basis of the life insurance contract is 
the pledge of industry, that a part of its 
current production shall be saved for a cer- 
tain number of years, or until a specified 
bulk sum has been accumulated. From this 
you will perceive that a life office is first a 
savings bank, over the deposits of which 
death is proportionately equated, and the 
general profits of the undertaking equitably 
divided. [ Hear, hear ! ] Thus you will see 
the moneys paid into a life office are not as 
sums to be dissipated in expense, or to be 
eaten up by the cost of some present benefit. 
Every fresh contract means an undertaking 
on the part of some individual to place him- 
self one day beyond want if he lives, or his 
family beyond immediate want if he dies. 
It is also a pledge to the community that he 
is, to the extent of such savings, yearly 
increasing the general wealth of his country, 
and putting so much of the profits of the 
hour beyond the allurements of chance and 

(103) 



104 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the disposition to indulgence and waste. 
[ Hear, hear ! ] Once committed through 
the intelligent and zealous labors of the life 
agent, the policy holder enters the ranks 
of thrift, as one in the God-inspired army of 
all-conquering virtue. [Applause.] 

A life office is, therefore, to be regarded as 
the embodiment of the noblest aspirations 
of man, and as the consecration of so much 
of his earnings to the future of life and to 
the betterment of the growing generation. 
[ Hear, hear ! ] A single glance at this 
proposition will suffice you to see that the 
popularization of the insurance idea means 
a larger individual and national prosperity; 
means the lessening of poverty and crime; 
means a wider intelligence and purer faith; 
and that to interpose any obstacle in the way, 
or to discourage its beneficiaries by special 
impositions of the State, would be like tax- 
ing knowledge at the fountain-head, religion 
at the altar, and the milk of life as it is ex- 
pressed at the mother's breast. [Applause.] 



[From the Telegraph, Brisbane, Queensland, January 19, 1892.] 

REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLAGE 

Series of Eloquent Speeches. 



(An Extract from the Introductory Notice^ 

'Y "HE visit of Mr. William P. Stewart, of 

-^ New York, to Brisba7ie, was signalized 

last night by a banquet at the l7nperial Hotel, 

that in many particulars excelled any function 

of the kind yet held in this city. 

The list of guests was an extensive one, and 
included representatives of the political, banking, 
commercial, and social circles of the city. 

Mr. Stewart on rising was most cordially 
received. 



(105) 



[From the Telegraph, Brisbane, Queensland, January 19, 1893.] 

OUR AMERICAN VISITOR 



{From an After Banquet Address) 

Mr. Chairman and Ge^itlemen: — 

HAVE not that assumption of pride in my 



I 



own attainments which would permit 
me to consider your presence here to-night 
as a compliment merely to myself. In my 
judgment, there are but few living men who 
would be justified in laying such a flattering 
unction to their souls as that so much of the 
representative mind and worth of Queens- 
land should assemble to do them individual 
honor. 



It has been my good fortune to give ut- 
terance to sentiments that you have been 
pleased to regard with favor, and to acquit 
myself as a representative of my country 
in a manner that you have been pleased to 
applaud. For this I take no credit to my- 

(io6) 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR 107 

self, for I feel that with the inspiration of 
such a presence there needs only a strain 
of English, or Scotch, or Irish blood in one's 
veins to make one an orator ; and I have at 
least two of these if not all three. 

You expect me to speak to you of America 
as of a country with which you desire the 
closest commercial intercourse, and with 
which you one day expect to make a parti- 
tion wall of the equator. [Laughter and 
applause.] 

You will be disappointed in what I shall 
say of this, because I feel more as the phi- 
losopher to-night than as the patriot. I will 
say in passing, however, that the voice of 
America is not to be heard from the lips 
of one man, nor its statecraft to be influ- 
enced by the desires of a separate people. 

Yet after all America can feel only as in 
the heart of some one, and can think only 
as in the brain of a single individual, and 
when her friendship is pledged, it will be 
with the grasp of but one right hand. It 
is then but worldly prudence, veil it as we 
may, to act on the supposition that with some 
near or remote effect — politically, finan- 
cially, and socially — it is Australia and 
America that are in touch when an Amer- 
ican and an Australian embrace. 

America can use all your wool, and one 
day its people will buy your meat, for you 



I08 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

will later on be able to supply it to our great 
cities cheaper than we shall be able to raise 
it on the plains that are now fast being cov- 
ered with towns and cities, as with the rub 
of Aladdin's lamp. The late election, has, 
undoubtedly, opened the door to you, but 
you must not expect to have it all your own 
way, and to send over your ships freighted 
with Australian produce, only to come back 
in ballast with American dollars. 

But all this is a question of politics with 
which this banquet has nothing to do, and 
I, therefore, drop the subject with the 
prophecy that early in the coming century 
America and Australia will be found at the 
two ends of a Pacific cable, and nearer each 
other by a week's journey, and with a short 
cut to the eastern markets, and an alternate 
route to Europe through the Nicaraguan 
Canal. 

In my speech at Sydney you may read of 
the principle involved in all forms of insur- 
ance, and of its potency and worth. In my 
speech to-night I intend to confine myself 
more to the presentation of the professional 
actuary and statist, and to indulge you more 
in the strain of what I shall call the ^^ Phi- 
losophy of Vital Statistics, ^^ in this keeping 
to the intellectual and dignified character of 
this banquet, and to my role of representa- 
tive student. 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR lOQ 

If I could indulge in individual eulogism, 
in a manner that so nearly concerns myself, 
it would be on " an occasion like this — 
where we are all committed to a kindly 
thought of each other by the salt we have 
eaten in common. 

I am yet a climber, and do not mind 
people saying pleasant things about me ; and 
I sincerely trust, gentlemen, that we are 
alike in this respect, for I can indulge noth- 
ing but eulogism in my talk of Australians, 
and I would like to feel free to make this 
somewhat manifest later on. For the pres- 
ent I must indulge the philosopher. 

POPULAR SUPPOSITION* 

The consensus of popular opinion is to 
the conclusion that the vitality of our race 
is waning ; that, in fact, life with us is being 
shortened, as the consequence of the so- 
called vices of civilization. From premises 
of supposition, merely, more than one book, 
and more than one essay, have been printed, 
and sermon preached, to a sequence of phys- 
ical and mental, and I migh t say moral 
deterioration that would leave humanity 
without a hope. ^^ Each generation grows 
more effeminated,^^ say these mentors, be- 
cause the need of physical culture, on lines 



* The sub-headings in this speech were inserted by the 
editor. 



no CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

of physiological harmony, is more and more 
ignored; and because exercise is indulged 
merely in those excesses of pleasure which 
weaken rather than strengthen the muscular 
system. 

The close of the ninteenth century is giv- 
ing birth to a race of smaller heads, it is 
said, and of lesser constitutional reserves, 
because of the growing complexity of society, 
the swifter currents of trade, the sharper 
competition of the many, and the consequent 
increasing tax on individual energy. There 
is a growth in nervous disorders, say author- 
ities, there is an increase in insanity, and a 
larger disposition to commit suicide ; a reck- 
less taking to drink, to gambling, and to 
those vices which demoralize and discourage. 

Some good men tell us, in substance, that 
the wholesome restraints of morality and 
religion are now being fought against ; that 
sentiment is now laughed at, that genius is 
now employed by the hour, and that art has 
become a ballet dancer. 

FACTS LEAVE RECORDS 

It is an aphorism of mine that ^^ facts leave 
records, ^^ and it is a habit of mine to turn 
to the index of these whenever a statement 
interests me. It is a proverbial saying that 
^^ figures won't lie,^^ as though they had a way 
of falling into exact relations of the truth, as 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR III 

the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope into exact 
angles. But in my experience I have found 
figures to be the most arrant liars ; and such 
because of their known universal exemption 
from popular analysis and understanding. 

Instinctively the reader will skip the table 
of supporting figures in the text of special 
assertion or argument, and content himself 
with the unverified statement of their sig- 
nificance. But for me the searching of 
statistics has always had the charm as of 
auriferous mountains to the gold hunter; 
and to me their various tongues have al- 
w^ays spoken as with the rhythm of poetry, 
the revelations of their truths have always 
sparkled as with the scintillations of rare 
gems. 

INDIVIDUAL LIFE IS BROADENING 

From my study of the dry facts of the 
world, limited though it has been to the short 
work hours of one little life, I have gathered 
conclusions that are directly opposed to the 
present popular pessimism. To me, human 
existence is intensifying, the span of individ- 
ual life is broadening, and the strength of 
man, particularly as massed humanity, is 
more herculean than ever. 

The facts which sustain me in this opin- 
ion lie everywhere at hand. Labor is now 
housed in palaces and clothed in the raiment 



112 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

of kings, as contrasted with its former oppor- 
tunity and means. Laws are now every- 
where enacted for the preservation of life ; 
sanitary conditions are now everywhere 
studied as the primary consideration of mu- 
nicipal government; quarantines are now 
built as stone walls across the pathway of 
epidemics. 

The percentage of wrecks by sea, and acci- 
dents on shore, grow yearly less, because 
collective science is now the mariner of the 
deep, and experienced prudence now signals 
from the watchtowers of the land. Surgeons 
now make daily conquests over diseases once 
regarded as be3^ond the skill of man; the 
more enlightened practice of medicine is now 
supplemented by the skilled nurse ; and the 
pathological chemist is constantly discover- 
ing specific antidotes to the more definite 
types of disease. The discovery of quinine 
alone has lessened the death-roll of the 
civilized world over a tenth. 

Our prisons are coming to be reforma- 
tories ; our hospitals now vie with each other 
in their percentages of cure — as cities ad- 
vertise their respective merits in the low- 
ness of the death rate. The human mind 
is everywhere busy with the problems of 
prevention, as the human heart is every- 
where throbbing with plans for relief. A 
disaster in Europe is now felt as a calamity 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR II3 

in America, and the granaries of the world 
now open to the cry of hunger from its 
remoter parts. 

We now make ice at the equator, and melt 
it at the poles; all extremes of climate are 
now everywhere within reach of a few days' 
journey; all seasons are present in the gen- 
eral market, and every year increases the 
variety of products, and diminishes the cost 
to the consumer. The forces of nature are 
everywhere becoming the bond slave of in- 
dustry, and more and more the earth yields 
up to man the means of his comfort and 
enrichment. 

Life is no longer a builder of pyramids, 
or a dweller within lean-to huts; human 
society is fast becoming an enclosure within 
perpendicular walls, instead of a series of 
terraces rising from ignorance to disdain. 

RACE VITALITY 

Many years ago I discovered, in studying 
the vital statistics of America, that the death 
rate of emigrant life, particularly that of the 
German, was materially greater than that 
of the American ; and that the vitality of the 
Semitic American was materially greater 
than that of the Anglo-Saxon — native or 
foreign. I found the family records of peo- 
ple in the hotter portions of the country 
better than in the colder ; since then I have 
8 



114 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

discovered the percentage of old age, in the 
annual death rate of the more settled com- 
munities, to be a steady increase when 
divided into decades; and that the contrast 
of one cycle with another for the last 500 
years warrants me in the belief that the 
twentieth century will chronicle the longest 
span of human life the world has seen. 

OLD AGE DEFERRED 

If you will notice, age in our day wears 
with a far greater appearance of youth than 
it did no farther back than, say, twenty-five 
years ago. I remember as a boy we were 
used to call men of 50 and a woman of 40 old 
people. Now we speak of a man of 50 as 
only an oldish young man. (Laughter.) In 
fact, I have divided age like this: First, the 
old young man, who is evidently young as 
yet, and bright and companionable ; but still 
somewhat advanced in years. Then there 
is the young old man, who is evidently to 
be classed with the old, and yet who main- 
tains that brightness of manner which 
makes him companionable with the young. 
Then there is the confessedly old, with his 
gaze turned literally to the other world. 

I remember on one occasion in the United 
States, lecturing on biology. The audience 
was of the serious-minded cast, and among 
them were several clergymen. I had been 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR II5 

explaining by what laws of selection age 
had been instinctively conserving to itself 
in our day the graces of youth, and had 
just finished this division under the three 
preceding heads, when a very grave indi- 
vidual arose, tall and gaunt, and with a 
deep sepulchral voice, asked me if I would 
kindly tell them at what age might a man 
be regarded as really old. 

I answered that when he found himself 
in some society reception and some beauti- 
ful young girl came up to him, and in the 
public gaze threw her white arms around 
his neck and printed upon his lips a loving 
kiss, without consciousness of shame, he 
might fold his hands and sadly conclude 
that he was indeed old. (Laughter and 
applause.) 

PHYSICAL CULTURE 

Just now there is a cry going the world 
round for physical culture, and our boys' col- 
leges and our girls' seminaries are being 
turned into nurseries for outdoor sports and 
indoor gymnastics, with a growing disposition 
to gamble on the endurance of legs, or the 
strength of arms, or to wreathe chaplets of 
honor for the hero of the kick or the heroine 
of a jump. 

Happily, in contrast with this there is also 
a tidal wave going the world round under 



ri6 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the inspiration of the Chautauqua Circles of 
America, and the basic mass of humanity 
is really coming to be the cultured of the 
world, and the teacher, rather than the 
taught, of the higher and stronger life. 

I say this is happily so, for, let me tell 
you, there is a health of mind, as well as 
of the body, which is to be preserved by 
obedience to spiritual rather than to ph3^sical 
law, and there is a strength of mind, which 
is infinitely more potent than the strength 
of body, and which is not grown by the 
swing of the dumb-bell, or lost by the cut- 
ting off of the hair. 

I regard the body as having long since 
reached the fullness of its age, while I re- 
gard the mind as yet in its swaddling clothes. 
The soul within has yet to stand forth as 
the adult man, and this will know neither 
weakness nor disease. 

Notwithstanding the achievements we 
boast of, I believe we shall appear to later 
generations as mental savages, who strutted 
over the domain of mind, to-day, as ignorant 
of its confined powers, as did the black man, 
farther back, over unvisited Australia, un- 
conscious of its stored-up energies. 

THE COMING RACE 

There is much said about a ^^ coming race ^^ 
in popular literature, but the conceptions of 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR II7 

it, SO far printed, have no basis in fact, or 
suggestiveness of desirability — or likelihood. 
But I can tell you that in the race of races, 
as now seen, there is already a distinctness 
gathering in favor of the Semitic type, as 
the final dominant or surviving force. And 
I would say that given its present excess 
of vitality, its present ratio of births, and 
its present acquisition of means, the ques- 
tion of finality is but a theorem of fact which 
may be algebraically stated. The manifes- 
tations of vitality, with this race, are greater 
than with any other, and yet its tenacity 
of life is not born of fox-hunting nor of the 
cricket ground. It is my opinion that when 
the secret of this has been discovered it 
will be seen as the one persistent domina- 
tion of mind over matter which has gone 
on for ages, and which is yet to be formu- 
lated by science, and set for all as the 
primary rule for the congenital mastery of 
weakness. 

THE COMING MAN 

There is also much said about the ^^ coming 
man.^^ I should say the coming man will 
be a ^^ woman >^ somewhere in the twentieth 
century. She will be realized first in Amer- 
ica, then later in her fairer and younger 
sister of Australia — to reign thereafter as 
the literal queen bee of the human hive. 



Il8 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

In Spite of the materialistic physiologists 
who assert that woman has a limited brain 
scope, she is literally gathering tip her skirts 
for a rush along all the avennes to power, 
and will leave but little room for man, when 
she has had her own sweet will in the col- 
lective and political sense, as she has it 
now in America in the individual asser- 
tions of her sex, and is winning it all over 
the world, especially wherever the English 
tongue is spoken. 

The Women's Christian Temperance Union 
of America, and the Women's Commission 
of the Columbia Fair, are evidences, the 
former of wonderful talent for organization, 
and the latter of wonderful creative ability 
in new departments. 

When I left Chicago, seven months ago, 
the headquarters of the Ladies' Christian 
Temperance Association, built by these 
ladies out of their association's money, 
was an Eiifel tower in height, comprising 
twenty-four commercial stories; and the 
Ladies' Commission of the Fair had already 
forced with man a division of the honors 
of administration to such an extent and to 
such bewildering results as to appear like 
the second writing upon the walls of Bel- 
shazzar's court. Woman is already a gen- 
eral voter in one of the States of the union, 
and a special voter in many, with the evi- 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR II9 

dence growing that the male politician is 
a born idiot to her. 

I have said that women will one day be 
the property-owners of the world. The 
maidens of to-day are much wiser in their 
generation than were their mothers. They 
regard the seniority of the husband as a 
necessity in a well-ordered marriage. With- 
out years a man rarely has the accumulation 
of means that qualify him for a marriage of 
to-day. The charm of being an ^^ old man's 
darling ^^ casts a broader spell over every 
fresh generation of girlhood. 

SPRING IN THE STOREHOUSE OF WINTER 

Every year a larger complement of young 
men reasonably come to the conclusion that 
they must first make a fortune before they 
enter into the bonds of wedlock. The con- 
trast between the average age of the bride 
and the average age of the bridegroom has 
grown distinctly more marked within the last 
twenty years. Spring is literally coming to 
take up her abode, not in the lap, but in the 
storehouse of winter, justly reasoning that 
without the seeds left over from a former 
harvesting she could not bring out those 
charms which are so perennially made the 
inspiration of the poet. 

I regard it as a proper thing that girls 
should marry sensibly ; but it is not a matter 



120 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

of my opinion. The cold logic of the fact is, 
that with the growing disparity in years, 
the wife naturally becomes the survivor, 
and the residuary legatee; and, generally, 
wnth the modern idealization of the Suttee of 
India, she immolates herself, not upon her 
husband's funeral pyre, but as upon the 
memory of that fostering love which had 
placed her beyond want. 

As a rule wealthy widows do not marry, for 
as a rule the reverse of the picture would 
then be true. From middle age on the 
health of women is better than that of 
men, and the averages of their lives longer, 
and these facts are emphasized when they 
are the possessors of assured incomes. 

woman's restlessness 

But there is a phase of modern woman- 
hood that is exerting a profound influence in 
the shaping of modern life, and which I do 
not remember to have ever seen under news- 
paper discussion; and that is her growing 
restlessness of limitation, particularly as to 
locality. To be sure this restlessness is not 
wholly confined to her. But men will con- 
tentedly work, isolated from their fellow- 
men, in the acquisition of those means 
which will one day qualify them for love 
and social life. But women do not willingly 
do this. 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR 121 

DECADENCE OF FARM LIFE 

You may observe in the older countries, 
even in the older portions of the United 
States of America, farms everywhere being 
abandoned. The artist's favorite ivy-grown 
cottage is allowed to tumble into ruin, the 
<^old oaken bucket ^^ of the song is allowed to 
hang idly in the rank grown well, and the 
old scarecrow in the cornfield to stand alone, 
as truly the visible ghost of a type that has 
passed into oblivion. 

Statistics show that there is a constantly 
increasing urban population at the expense 
of the suburban; the charms of cattle pas- 
tures and of truck farms are yearly paling 
before the light of the city's blaze. The 
farmer can no longer bring up his children 
satisfied with a country home. These will 
not hesitate to complain of the selfishness of 
parents who have deprived them of the edu- 
cational and trade opportunities of the city. 

In America, the ladies look longingly for a 
residence in the city of New York, to them 
the Mecca of social divinity. In Australia 
there is everywhere the talk of ^^ home ^^ and 
^^ going home ^^ which, when critically in- 
quired into, means a life in London — to you 
the city of the world. The Frenchwoman 
has ever her heart turned to Paris. The 
fashionable summer or winter haunts of 



122 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

America have woman as the preponderat- 
ing guest, and, I venture to say. this may- 
be found as literally true of Europe, and as 
substantially so of Australia. 

OUT OF SOCIETY OUT OF LIFE 

It is a popular aphorism among women 
that ^^ to be out of society is to be out of the 
world. ^^ It is a strange fact that none go 
back to the abandoned farm in America, 
except some misanthropic recluse to die in 
the solitude of the homestead ruin. This 
distinction should be born in mind in consid- 
ering the tendency to centralization. The 
farm, as a means of livelihood, and the farm 
as a residence, are two distinct propositions. 
As a residence modern civilization abandons 
it ; as a means of livelihood it is in compe- 
tition with capital, science, and improved 
machinery, and is under the restriction of 
trade necessities. 

Years ago the reverse of this was true, for 
wives were regarded then as household 
drudges, and children as bond slaves, but 
this was before the era of modern journalism, 
of steam travel, and electrical conveyance; 
before city sanitation, electric lights, and 
tramway service ; before knowledge and art 
and grace had become public missionaries. 
The farm was then the common dream of 
Paradise, but that is never to be again. 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR 123 

This is the age of cities and of city life. 
I think the growth in this direction has been 
somewhat forced by the recent land booms, 
but the tendency was long before, and, in my 
judgment, will continue intensifying to the 
end. As the speed of travel is increased, 
and the cost diminished, cities will grow 
into larger and larger circumference. As 
the health, comfort, and pleasures of life 
become more and more the result of associa- 
tion, the hope of one day living in a great 
city will be the single aspiration of all 
remoter life ; and as the movement will be 
rather by stages, from the nearer to the 
farther, from the farm to the village, the 
village to the city, it will one day come to 
be that a selection in favor of the larger and 
larger cities will go on, until London and 
New York shall come to be the cosmopolitan 
homes of the world's wealth, and thus a new 
significance be found in Tennyson's favorite 
line — 

« Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 
SELF-SELECTION 

A few minutes ago I touched somewhat on 
the health and strength of the mind, and the 
wonders concerning it which were yet to be 
revealed. As somewhat elucidative of my 
position, I will tell you of a phase of mental 
influence and direction that I first discovered 



124 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

in the study of life insurance statistics. It is 
mental phenomenon merely, which years 
ago I classed under the head of ^^ self-selec- 
tion. » 

As you know, there has been this broad 
distinction in the plans of life insurance. 
One plan benefited only at death. If paid 
for until death ensued it was called an ^^ ordi- 
nary life policy ^^; if paid for in a limited 
number of years, but to mature at death, it 
was called a ^4imited payment life policy ^^; 
if taken with the understanding that it was 
to continue in force for only a limited num- 
ber of years, but to mature only at death, 
should it happen within the years stipulated, 
it was called, a ^^ term life policy. ^^ Then 
there was another plan which matured at 
the end of a certain number of years, in a 
cash payment to the party insured, if then 
alive, or to his beneficiaries at death, if hap- 
pening before, and this was called an ^^ en- 
dowment policy. ^^ The period of maturity 
might be far off — say for 20 or 30 years, 
and this would be called a ^^long endow- 
ment,^^ or it might be made to mature in 
ten or fifteen years, and this would be called 
a ^^ short endowment. ^^ 

Now in stuaying the data furnished by the 
records of a life insurance company, to which 
I had access, I made the discovery that, tak- 
ing the ^nimited life policy holders ^^ as a 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR 125 

whole, where loo deaths had been expected, 
the company lost but j%, that, taking the 
^^ whole life policy-holders^^ in like manner, 
where loo deaths had been expected, the 
company lost but 93 ; and that taking the 
^^ term life policy-holders^^ together, where 
100 deaths had been expected, the company 
lost, as an inexplicable fact, 172. With re- 
spect to the endowment policy-holders, taken 
as a group, I found that, where 100 deaths 
had been expected with the ^^ short endow- 
ment policy-holders,^^ the company had lost 
73; and that where 100 deaths had been 
expected with the ^^ long endowment policy- 
holders, ^^ the company had lost but 58 — 
showing a saving in mortality equally as 
inexplicable as the excessive death rate ex- 
perienced with the ^^term life policies. ^^ 

Now, when you understand that all the 
lives thus insured had all passed through the 
same critical examination as to health, and, 
so far as medical experience went in those 
days, they were all to be regarded as equally 
insurable lives, the conclusion which these 
facts justif}^ is that the plan itself had at- 
tracted; and this in accordance with the 
character of its appeal to the instinct hope- 
fulness or despondency of life ; and that that 
form which would reward longevity would 
be taken naturally by the applicant feeling 
the certainty of his living into old age ; while 



126 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

that form which would reward at death only, 
would be taken by the assured on the plan 
and terms of payment most in accord with 
his doubt as to the years of life he had yet 
to live. 

Assuming this to be the truth, then it fol- 
lows that the policy-holders of the ^^ term 
plan ^^ deceived the company's examiner ; or, 
that, having no special knowledge of inher- 
ent weakness, they had instinctively reasoned 
to an early death. My own conviction, is, 
however, that some truth may lie in both 
suppositions, but that the major truth is to 
be sought in the influence of committal and 
the strength of will and pride of attainment 
that gathers about it. If the undertaking 
be of a kind that will free and sustain life 
later on there is a constant happiness in its 
contemplation, there is an inspiration to 
down all obstacles in the way of its fruition, 
and a hopefulness that sustains through all 
the disappointments of the present. Such 
an endeavor is undeniably a healthful tonic 
always. 

MARK HIGHER THAN YOU CAN KICK 

To get to a broader understanding of my 
meaning, this principle may be stated some- 
thing like this : If you jump without regard 
to measure, you have no consciousness of 
improvement with each successive jump; 



far 



OUR AMERICAN VISITOR 127 

but if you fix a mark somewhere, you will 
find as you jump to it there will be generated 
an ambition to jump still beyond it; and the 
ability for a farther jump will come with 
every renewed effort. ^^Mark higher than 
you can kick ^^ is a good rule if you want to 
keep up the highest standard of ability. The 
mind itself is often diseased, and the first 
symptoms are usually conditions of morbid- 
ity. As you can starve the body so you can 
starve the mind ; as you weaken the body so 
may you weaken the mind ; and as you tone 
up the one so may you tone up the other. 
The means are quite different, of course, but 
they may be rendered equally effective. 

A SOUND MIND WILL MAKE A SOUND BODY 

I hold that a sound mind will make a sound 
body ; the strongest man I ever knew died of 
quick consumption at the age of 31, because 
he suffered his mind, once brilliant and 
aggressive, to weaken under the burden of a 
great mistake. Education and athletic train- 
ing had made of him a perfect specimen of 
their work, but it had not given him a moral 
grasp of self, nor the fight tmderstanding of 
the mind — though a physician. 

As easily as you may train the muscles of 
the arm, you can train the energies of the 
mind. It is an affair of the will in both 
instances. But for this training to be carried 



128 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

on snccessftilly, there must be an object in 
view; there must be a goal ahead that 
blesses with the anticipation. 

I hold that a man may will, if he would, 
his mind into a condition of cheerfulness, his 
face into a wreath of smiles, and his body 
into a feeling of health ; where» otherwise, if 
the tendency was not fought against, he 
might become morbid of mind, gloomy of 
presence, and physically unstrung. 

In a word, gentlemen, I wish you to under- 
stand that I believe in such a principle as 
^^ self-selection,^^ that we can all train for it 
if we will, and that if we dress for a bridal 
party we may be permitted to kiss the bride, 
but that if we dress for a funeral we must 
expect to train with the hearse. 

Gentlemen, this is not only the close of 
my remarks to-night, but my public good- 
bye to Australia. I shall leave your beauti- 
ful Queensland with only about time enough 
to get comfortably off on the Ciotat on Sat- 
urday week. It was for this moment that I 
had reserved my intended, eulogy of the 
Australian; it was now that I intended to 
say those nice things to you face to face 
that I have been so frequently saying be- 
hind your back. I have never failed in the 
ease of this before, but just now, the one re- 
frain running in my mind — meaning more 
than you can imagine, gentlemen, and to 
more than you may know is — ^^ Good-bye. ^^ 



[Frmi the Oklahoma State Capital, April 18, 1901.] 

( Extracts frojn an Interview ) 



^< \/ou have been a great traveler, have 

1 you not, professor ? ^^ 

^^ Well, perhaps so, I have certainly visited 
nearly all accessible parts of this continent, 
and much of the world at large. I have 
crossed the Equator twice in one year, I 
made a zig-zag path around the world of 
35,000 miles, I have visited many of its 
places, and been among many of its strange 
races. ^^ 

^< Your profession is that of an actuary, 
I am told. Just what is the nature of that 
profession ? ^^ 

^^In general it has to deal with the vital 
statistics of the world. In specific relations, 
it mathematically sums up, defines and pre- 
sents the insurance problems as they are 
dealt with commercially. Necessarily, an 
actuary must be a mathematician. The 
more scientific and general his knowledge, 
otherwise, the more capable he his and the 
more prominent he becomes. ^^ 

9 (129) 



[From the Inswrance Record, New York, December, 1891.] 

THE FUTURE EARNING POWER OF 
INSURANCE INVESTMENTS 



WITH REFERENCE TO PRESENT GUARANTEES 



RECENT journeyings over this broad conti- 
nent, and mnch mingling with the insurer 
and the insured in that later function of the 
actuary — the agent's professional instructor 
— has shown me that there is a growing 
apprehension, both in the popular and the 
agency mind, concerning the rate of interest 
which may obtain in the near future of life 
insurance companies, and a disposition to 
speculate, in a pessimistic vein, as to the 
probable effect of this on the outcome of 
the business. The conviction seems to be 
deepening that the present rate of interest 
cannot be maintained for a lengthy period of 
years, and that within the life of any of the 
longer endowment terms the rate obtainable 
will be materially lower than that assumed 
in the present issue of such contracts. 
(130) 



INSURANCE INVESTMENTS I3I 

Speculation extends in some minds even to 
the possible solvency of a life office under 
supposition of a total extinction of interest 
earning, or of an available rate so nominal 
as to amount practically to the same thing. 

In considering how best to respond to 
your request to contribute an article to your 
Christmas Number, I could but conclude 
that I should meet your views the more 
surely, as according more with the technical 
character of your paper, were I to choose as 
my subject the great interest with which we 
are both identified — Life Insurance — and 
for the present purpose, that phase of its 
expression which lies nearer the surface of 
the present argument, and which is the more 
frequently met in the daily rounds of your 
principal reader — the Life Agent. This I 
believe to be suggested by the above cap- 
tion, and premising only, at the outset, that 
I claim no prescience of judgment, and ex- 
press only the views of an individual, I 
submit what follows as the result of those 
studies which the exigencies of my profes- 
sion have necessitated and applied. 

As this article is addressed more partic- 
ularly to the lay mind, I shall best prepare 
the understanding to profit by what I am 
about to say by giving a simple definition of 
what is regarded, in law, and by the profes- 
sion, as a test of a life company's solvency 



132 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

The company enters into an agreement 
with its policy holders to pay certain moneys 
in certain set future years, or contingently 
at death, if sooner, on the strength of cer- 
tain premiums stipulated to be paid to the 
company by such policy holders. Not to 
take from the policy holder more than may 
be required for safety, the company assumes 
in advance, as with the present practice, that 
it will earn, during the life of the policy, 4 
per cent, compound interest, and there- 
fore, in calculating the necessary premium, 
it makes it so much smaller than it would 
otherwise be, by allowing this interest by 
way of discount in advance. 

To maintain solvency thereafter the law 
says in substance, ^^A life company shall 
have at all times a sum of money in reserve, 
that is to say, safely invested, equal to the 
difference between the 4 per cent, discount 
value of all its pending obligations and the 
4 per cent, discount value of all the future 
premiums due it by the policy holders — 
separated from such margins as were origi- 
nally calculated to pay expenses and pro- 
vide an adequate emergency fund in case of 
the unexpected. ^^ 

Now, so long as the company is earning 
more than 4 per cent, interest per annum, it 
is to be regarded as solvent, because the 
statement is that ^^ the balance so found for 



INSURANCE INVESTMENTS ^33 

any particular policy, which is technically 
called its reserve, if increased by 4 per cent, 
interest annually, and added to in propor- 
tion, for each after premium due to be paid, 
if any, less the death-cost by the way, will 
equal the face of the policy at its maturity. ^^ 
As it is evident that a company cannot con- 
sistently calculate its reserve on an interest 
assumption higher than it actually earns, so 
it must follow that when the earnable rate 
falls below the reserve-rate, as established, 
a new and still lower rate in valuation must 
be adopted, and, as a consequence, a larger 
present sum must be held in reserve to meet 
the same future obligations. 

Taking, with the first supposition, that 
^^ the rate of interest-earning must steadily 
lessen, under the pressure of predominant 
causes, and ultimately reach a point below 
present contract assumptions,^^ the question 
is ^^ How is the life insurance company's sol- 
vency to be maintained ? ^^ I have replied that 
its contrac4: basis is never individual, as to 
the person or the year, but calculated, al- 
ways, as a theoretical fraction of the given 
whole at any given time ; that a life office is 
never in the position of issuing, or carrying, 
policy contracts on the assumption of a 
higher rate of interest-earning than that at 
which it is presently reserving, and that its 
reserve-rate always has been, and always 



134 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

will be, as the result of a precaution in 
method, lower than the average of the inter- 
est-rate currently available ; that the rate of 
interest can never fall so suddenly as to find 
the company unprepared to readjust all its 
outstanding obligations on the basis of re- 
quired solvency, or so low as to find it in such 
a condition — so shorn of surplus — as not to 
be able to reestablish its outstanding con- 
tracts as if originally predicated on the then 
necessitated lower reserve rate. The New 
York life companies have twice demon- 
strated the practicability of doing this — 
having first contracted and reserved on the 
basis of an earning power of 5 per cent. 
interest, then on 4>^, and now on 4 — as they 
may again, if called upon in the near future, 
by a still further lowering of the available 
rate, at 3 >^, or even 3 percent., with the same 
ease and absence of apprehension. 

As the first cause, and that which is oper- 
ating to lessen the rate of interest, the 
Government, as a borrower, is to be regarded 
as being in a position to challenge conces- 
sions to an acknowledged stability, and, 
with it, is to be classed all that description 
of bonded securities to which the insurance 
companies, savings banks, and trust corpora- 
tions are restricted by law. These so appeal 
to capitalists, syndicates, and the corpora- 
tions affected, as to place them in direct 



INSURANCE INVESTMENTS I35 

competition, one with the other — as indi- 
viduals and associations, as underbidders of 
interest, deliberately cooperating to con- 
tract their own opportunity for profit, as in 
obedience to the statute law constraining 
them to this form of investment, or under 
compulsion of the trade law regulating the 
price by the proportions of supply to the 
demand. 

As the second cause, and that which is 
operating to raise the rate of interest, there 
is to be seen another class of borrowers, 
who have not this established character, 
who wish to borrow limited amounts and 
give some individual property security. 
These borrowers are in competition, each 
with the other, to raise the rate of interest, 
because their combined demand is always 
greater than the supply. They borrow to 
open up new opportunities, to establish new 
enterprises, and to create new forms of 
wealth, and the rate of interest which they 
can afford to pay is simply to be measured 
by the profit which they can realize from 
their use of capital. 

The past investments of life companies 
have lain largely with this class of bor- 
rowers, and their investment opportunities 
of the future lie still as largely in this direc- 
tion, and with this, as possibly better, in the 
creation of office properties in the leading 



136 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

cities of the country. In the latter respect 
the companies have a practically unrestricted 
field, and one wherein superior management 
may be greatly emphasized to the lasting 
profit of the policy holder. 

As to whether it is a wise law, when all is 
considered, which so limits the investment 
opportunity of a life office, savings bank, or 
trust company, that it is made subjective to 
the borrower, and placed in enforced compe- 
tition with the other members of its own 
class, and so, literally, to strive for a lessen- 
ing popularity with its own members or de- 
positors, and for a possible discouragement 
of the savings thrift of the country, may be 
food for proper reflection at a time when 
legislatures are being urged by inconsiderate 
men to still further limitations as to admis- 
sible securities, and particularly to the cur- 
tailment of the companies' investments in 
office properties. In such respects law ought 
to be expressed as the solicitude of the no- 
blest wisdom for the obtainment of the 
largest benignity, and its truer function 
should be claimed as for the enlargement 
rather than for the restriction of thrift-unit- 
ing liberty. 

The fact should not be lost sight of that 
an established life insurance company can 
as easily undertake and maintain a guaran- 
tee predicated upon the equation of property- 



INSURANCE INVESTMENTS 137 

risks or investments, as upon the lives of 
individuals, and that if greater latitude in 
this respect were to be devised, a still greater 
era of thrift and attendant general pros- 
perity might be gained. But whatever may 
come to be the law governing the employ- 
ment of trust funds, the position of the life 
office must be seen to be relatively assured. 

In this short essay my aim has been to 
correct the supposition that the stability of 
life companies is to be jeopardized by the 
downward tendency in the earning power of 
their assets, and to give surface to the fact 
that two opposite interest oportunities lie 
open to the life companies, the one, domi- 
nated by the Government and the law, hav- 
ing a pressure downward, and the other, dom- 
inated by the genius and business activity 
of the country, having a tendency upwardp 
and that between the extremes of these two 
the life insurance companies will find a sta- 
ble and a satisfying average rate of interest, 
as in successful contrast with the experience 
of the average individual investor. 

I have here stated but two general factors, 
as dominating the rate of interest, but there 
is a third which, perhaps, I should present, 
as in a manner affecting it, and this is to be 
seen in the modern ability to create, almost 
inimitably, new property values, and to 
^^ water ^^ or ^^ boom >^ the nominal value of 



138 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

anything far beyond its intrinsic value in 
use or reproduction. On the surface this 
tendency will be seen as in the direction 
of lessening the rate of interest, because 
the relative earning power is lessened in 
proportion to the increase in the nominal 
property value, it being seen that while a 
combination of speculators may put up the 
property-value, it will take a combination of 
successful users to provide the income, and 
this has its sterling limits and is in no 
manner inflatable. Rent is simply another 
name for interest. The tenant is the bor- 
rower, for the time being, of the landlord's 
property, and the ability to pay interest is 
limited to the opportunity for profitable use. 
Hence, there is naturally a constant pres- 
sure downward for inflated values. Loaners 
discriminate against such ; buyers have re- 
gard always to the possibility of a fall; 
taxes get to breathe the air of inflation, 
speculation cools, and the permanent value 
subsides to a point where it can be sustained 
by the user. In most of such efforts, how- 
ever, it is to be seen that the capital orig- 
inally employed was a large interest payer 
to the loaner, and that the basic conditions 
of such new creations, or speculative ad- 
vancements, are really tendencies to a higher 
rate of interest in primary loans. 



[Mainly from the columns of the Worcester Spy, Worcester, Mass., Feb. 23, 1900.] 

THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 
AND THEIR LESSONS AS CON- 
CURRENTLY REVEALED 



(An Address Delivered Before the Life Under- 
writers' Association of Central Massachusetts, 
in Worcester, Mass., on the Night of Feb- 
ruary 22, IpOO) 

Mr, Chairman and Gentlemen: — 

1AM sure there are none here who need 
to be told that the policies of life in- 
surance are based upon the ascertained 
relations between life and death, as deter- 
mined by age, and as influenced by locality, 
heredity, occupation, and sex. Of late years 
the different civilized nations of the earth 
have vied with each other in the endeavor 
to throw the broadest possible light on 
these relations and to collect reliable data 
for the purposes of scientific study and 
deduction. It is not only that life insur- 
ance has come to be reared successfully 
as a great financial proposition upon the 
data thus collected, but that many other 

(139) 



140 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

relations of life have been brought into 
more or less intimate concern with its 
governing statistics. Of these, the more 
intimate relations are undoubtedly those 
of the medical and surgical professions, 
whose advancement owes much to the 
labors of the statistician, and, back of the stat- 
istician, to the painstaking compilations of 
the Government and the business-determined 
experience of the life companies. 

Not so many years ago the world was 
not only without its statistician, but with- 
out any systematic or comprehensive tabu- 
lation of its facts. No further away than 
the middle of the seventeenth century was 
there any attempt at a study of populations 
and ages of people living, and the probable 
number of deaths in a year, to say nothing 
of the determining causes. A Captain John 
Graunt was the first life student in English 
history, and he in his day was regarded as 
a curiosity. He busied himself with the 
probable population of London ; but with no 
responsible statement of facts to go upon, 
his conclusions were more of the rule of 
thumb than of any scientific ascertainment. 
Nevertheless, it was a beginning, and led 
from one individual to another, until, in 
almost the last year (1698) of the seven- 
teenth century, there was the establishment 
of the first company (The Mercers'), under- 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS I4I 

taking to insure life. Its undertaking, how- 
ever, was confined to the issue of annuities. 
Subsequently, this company obtained the 
right to undertake insurance against death, 
and, as showing the vitality of the propo- 
sition thus based upon the mathematically- 
determined facts of life, it is to be said 
that this company is still in existence. 

The year before there had been the first 
case known in legal history of an insurance 
against death; it was that of a man (Sir 
Robert Howard), who had been insured for 
the term of one year by a merchant. It 
so happened that the man died a year and 
a day from the date of the contract, and 
payment was refused on the ground of 
expiry. His heirs sued for the sum insured, 
and gained their case on the decision that 
the contract had read ^^ one year from date,^^ 
which, the court held, excluded the day of 
the date of the contract. The first com- 
pany to issue death policies, however, was the 
Amicable (1706), still in existence, and the 
next company was the Hand-in-Hand, also 
still in existence. Thus we may see how 
stable are the institutions reared upon truth, 
and how important is its ascertainment. 

To successfully undertake the granting 
of annuities requires an understanding of 
the probabilities of life as determined by 
the age of the annuitant, and considered 



142 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

with respect to the longevity of the most 
favored class. To deal in like manner with 
the undertakings of life insurance requires 
a consideration of the probabilities of death, 
and this generally, as to age, and specific- 
ally, as to heredity, occupation, habit, and 
locality. Insomuch the requirements of all 
the life and annuity insurance companies 
of the world are the same. They all need 
to know, and they all seek to know, the 
intrinsic facts ; and these, as they are found 
by the statistician, and given their mathe- 
matical significance by the actuary. But 
these companies are not alone in the work 
of gathering life's records of itself. The 
Government now undertakes to deal with 
the questions of life as more generally of 
the people, and as only the State has the 
right and power to take under view. 

Thus, in the domain of Vital Statistics, 
there are two great agencies at work, busy 
in collecting and determining its facts, each 
by a different method and as impelled by 
different interests, yet leading to the same 
conclusions, — the better understanding of 
the relative weaknesses and vitalities of hu- 
man existence. Independent of these two 
agencies, however, there are many other 
agencies at work, in widely different spe- 
cialties, and yet in more or less identity, 
and all, to the few who study at the very 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS I43 

top of things, contributory to an all-round 
advancement of the knowledge of man. 

It is not my purpose to-night to go over 
very much of the ground, for such an oc- 
casion would not justify it, even if time 
permitted. It is only that I may consist- 
ently challenge your interest in some one or 
two of the divisions of this subject, and this 
only in such of the more specific features 
as are of the more specific value, and under 
the more general consideration. 

There is nothing in all the range of sub- 
jects more interesting than the question of 
life. There is no one so ignorant, so little 
given to reading or to thought, but that he 
may be immediately interested in the prob- 
lem as to how to avoid death and defer 
old age. The knowledge of our schools, 
the science of our professions, the art of 
our entertainments, all converge in the 
determination of the same thing, — the most 
practical means as to right living; and these 
are all the evolution of the one fact added 
to or contrasted with another. 

Sydney Smith is quoted as saying, 
^^ There is nothing so unreliable as figures, 
unless it is facts. ^^ And this seems to bear 
out the general cynicism of the times, which 
voices itself in the statem_ent, ^^ You can prove 
anything by statistics. ^^ To which I would 
reply, ^^ You can prove nothing as to the 



144 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

nature or order of occurrence without them.^^ 
It is not only true of statistics, but true of 
all things, that the story as told upon the 
surface is always misleading in some part; 
but this does not perpetuate error. The 
truth may be read between the figures, as 
we often read it between the lines, and to- 
night I propose to take you with me in 
w^hat I hope will be something of an inter- 
esting reading between the figures, and the 
division of Vital Statistics which I shall dis- 
cuss with you will be that relating to death 
and the causes of death. 

In generic division, there are four causes 
of death. There are those deaths which 
result from disease, those which result from 
accident, those from violence, and those by 
the deliberate act of the individual, — that 
is to say, by suicide. It will be interesting 
for you to know that according to the last 
census report of the United States, that is 
to say, the 1890 report, it was shown for 
the State of New York that of 100,000 deaths 
for all ages above 20, 94,735 were from dis- 
ease, 4,280 from accident, 771 from suicide, 
and 214 from violence. You will be sur- 
prised thus to learn the exceedingly small 
percentage of death from accident as in 
contrast with the deaths from disease, these 
being for all ages but a trifle over 4 per cent. 
This is what the Government tells us. Now 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS I45 

we have the like figures as told from the 
standpoint of the life insurance company. 

The mortuary history of a prominent life 
insurance company is being completed for 
publication by that company's medical stat- 
istician. This is to be based on an ex- 
perience of 54,000 deaths. From this I have 
learned that on the assumption of 100,000 
deaths, there would be 93,518 deaths by 
disease, — something like 1,200 less, you will 
observe, than the disease rate shown by 
the census for the like ages. This was to 
have been expected, as the result of med- 
ical selection. But the number of accidents 
was only 3,932, — some 350 less accidents 
in the 100,000 than shown by the census; 
but when we come to suicide and to vio- 
lence there is a singular contrast the other 
way; there are 2,113 suicides of the insured 
as against 771 by the census, — nearly three 
times as many in the ranks of the insured 
as in the general life ; and there are to 
be seen 437 deaths from violence in the 
insured ranks, as against 214 in the com- 
munity at large. Here, then, is an oppor- 
tunity for the reading between the figures, 
as here we have an exhibit of the value 
of concurrent statistics. Here are two ag- 
gregations of facts; on its surface each one 
tells an arbitrary tale, but when in contrast 
a distinctive abstract significance is born. 



146 



CONCRETE IDENTITIES 



It is interesting and suggestive, to say the 
least. Do men commit suicide as policy- 
holders, when, under like conditions, they 
would not do it did they not carry insur- 
ance policies ? And if they do do it, is it 
to be regarded as inviting the stigma of 
fraud, or as exhibiting a condonable readi- 
ness of manhood to immolate itself in the 
protection of its beloved? Again, is vio- 
lence among insured lives an evidence of 
an expression of suicide unclassified; or is 
it that the insured is of such a social char- 
acter and environment as to invite the larger 
relative percentage of murder ? I have here 
a table marked ^^A^^ which shows these 
facts for each age, but which, not to take 
up your time by reading at length, I will 
submit to be copied by your reporters. 

Table A. The Four Causes of Death. Relative Number 
of Each in 100,000 Deaths. Community, Life, and In- 
sured Life Contrasted. 





VIOLENCE 


SUICIDE 




Commun'y 


Insured 


Commun'y 


Insured 




Ufe 


I.ife 


Ivife 


I,ife 


20-29 


59 


58 


146 


^7§ 


30-39 


41 


207 


146 


i^l 


40-49 


43 


109 


161 


628 


50-59 


34 


52 


157 


610 


60-69 


21 


II 


113 


219 


70 and over 


16 





48 


40 




214 


437 


771 


2113 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 



147 



Table A — Continued 





ACCIDENT 


DISEASE 


AGES 


Commun'y 
I,ife 


Insured 
I,ife 


Commun'y 
I.ife 


Insured 
Life 


20-29 

30-39 
40-49 

60-69 

70 and over 


958 
972 
763 

467 
489 


4^5 
760 

IO31 

922 

546 

258 


13950 
14046 
13272 
14005 

15754 
23708 


3879 
10750 
15160 
21806 
24040 
17883 




4280 


3932 


94735 


93518 



I said that life policies were determined 
by age as influenced by heredity, locality, 
occupation, and sex. Let us see what he- 
redity might have to say as to why it should 
be taken into consideration. I have here a 
small table from the United States Census, 
which gives the death rate of the different 
European countries in contrast with our 
own, and those again, for the year 1880 as 
contrasted with the year 1890. The one 
set of figures, for 1880, tells us that begin- 
ning with the United States and ending 
with Hungary, the death rate is from 18 to 
37 per thousand. This is a revelation of a 
wide difference in vitality as marked by 
countries. But when we look at the figures 
for 1890 we find that they range from 18 
for the United States to 32 for Hungary, 
and when we consult these figures in con- 
trast for each of the several states, we dis- 



I40 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

cover that in every instance but one — and 
that of Norway — the death rate of these 
foreign states for 1890 was materially less 
than that of 1880; showing a marked in- 
crease in the vitality of human life gener- 
ally. It should, however, be understood in 
this connection, that the wide difference 
in general vitality here shown is to be 
looked for as confined to the younger ages, 
and to the more improvident classes, as 
the experience of life insurance companies 
discloses no such discrepancies with respect 
to insured lives generally, as thus con- 
trasted. This is, too, a denial of the pop- 
ular supposition that the vitality of our 
race is lessening, that the greater strain 
of modern living is developing a new class 
of diseases, and of a more fatal import, to 
be named neurotic, or nervous. The fact 
is, there is a larger growth of mind abroad. 
This necessarily implies a higher-wrought 
nervous system, a more delicate adjustment 
of vital relations, but not necessarily an at- 
tendant debility. On the contrary, with the 
larger mind there is the greater strength, — 
the firmer will to live and the greater 
knowledge necessary to this end. 

Here, then, is another expression of con- 
current statistics. We need not only the 
facts for the one country but for the many 
countries; not only the facts for the one 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 



149 



series of years but for the many series of 
years; and by this means we are taught 
to see more clearly out ahead of us. I will 
submit this table, as the other, without 
taking your time for its detail reading. It 
is marked ^^B.^^ 

Table B. The World's Death Rate. From the U. S. 
Census Report, 1890. 

RATH OF DEATH PER THOUSAND 



COUNTRIES 



DEATH 


RATE 


1S90 


I880 


18.0 


18.0 


194 


204 


19.5 


20.5 


19.7 


20.5 


18.2 


19.8 


19.0 


204 


17.8 


15.9 


I7.I 


I8.I 


29.4 


29.8 


324 


37.3 


20.9 


21.9 


244 


26.0 


24.0 


25-5 


20.5 


23.5 


20.6 


22.3 


22.5 


22.8 


264 


30.8 



United States 

United Kingdom... 
England and Wales 

Scotland 

Ireland 

Denmark 

Norway 

Sweden 

Austria 

Hungary 

Switzerland 

German Empire 

Prussia 

The Netherlands . . . 

Belgium 

France 

Italy 



Now, as to locality in its significance 
nearer home. I have here a table from 
the census, showing the number living at 
and over 60 in a population of 100,000; or, 
in other words, the predominance of old 
age — or rather, life at the threshold of old 



150 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

age. We find these to vary, beginning 
with Wyoming, exhibiting 2,029 of that age 
in 100,000 of population, and running 
through all our States and Territories until 
in Vermont we find the number to be 12,- 
159, and in New Hampshire 12,223. Here, 
then, is a startling lesson. Is it that Ver- 
mont and New Hampshire are so much 
healthier than Wyoming, and that people 
in our older States average to live into a 
far greater age than in our newer Terri- 
tories ? Or is it that Wyoming has been 
gathering from the world at large the 
younger ages ? And is it that Vermont 
and New Hampshire, for the^opposite reason, 
have been sending forth their younger life, 
to retain their older ? Here is a case where, 
perhaps, statistics might be fairly charged 
with lying, so far as this face significance 
might be challenged. The fact is curious, 
let us determine it as we may. But you 
see we need here something of a broader 
contribution of statistics to determine the 
vital fact involved; and these could be 
supplied only and definitely by the life 
companies. I will submit this table with 
the others. It is marked ^^C.^^ 

Then there is the question of the relation 
of sex to death. I have here a table based 
upon the census report, which exhibits, in 
contrast, the death rate of the woman and 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 



151 



Table C. Comparative Old Age Rate — United States. 
Number Living at and Over 60 in a Population of 
100,000. Census^ 1890. 



STATES AND 
TERRITORIES 



NUMBER 
LIVING 



STATES AND 
TERRITORIES 



NUMBER 
LIVING 



Wyoming 

Montana 

Oklahoma 

Colorado 

Washington 

Arkansas 

North Dakota. . . 

Arizona 

Texas 

Nebraska 

Idaho 

South Dakota. . . 

Florida 

Mississippi 

New Mexico 

Alabama 

Georgia 

Louisiana 

South Carolina . 

Kansas 

Oregon 

Tennessee 

Missouri 

Utah 

Minnesota 



2,029 
2,410 
2,859 
3,002 
3,194 
3,470 
3,582 
3,609 

3,697 
3,782 

3,913 
4,186 

4,249 
4,400 
4,490 
4,549 
4,723 
4,780 

4,792 
4,862 
4,992 
5,007 
5,021 
5,346 
5,373 



West Virginia 

Kentucky 

Nevada 

North Carolina.. . 

Illinois 

Virginia 

Dist. of Columbia 

Iowa 

Indiana 

California 

Pennsylvania 

Maryland 

New Jersey 

Michigan 

Delaware 

Ohio 

Wisconsin 

New York 

Rhode Island 

Massachusetts 

Connecticut 

Maine 

Vermont 

New Hampshire. 



5,423 
5,491 
5,512 

5,534 
5,902 
6,267 
6,3M 
6,534 
6,574 
6,574 
6,740 

6,754 
6,948 
6,961 

7,075 

7,482 

7,592 
7,873 
7,901 
8,419 

9,315 
11,564 
12,159 

12,223 



the man for the several so-called regis- 
tration States; showing that out of 242,163 
deaths, or 20 and a fraction per thousand 
of the population, there were 21 and a frac- 
tion per thousand of the deaths by males 
and only 19 and a fraction per thousand 
by females; and that, beginning with Con- 
necticut, the death rate was: for males, 



152 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

20.38 per thousand to 18.42 per thousand 
for females, and that with every State this 
distinction or difference was maintained, 
save in the one case of Vermont, where the 
male death rate was only 15.69 as against 
female 16.97. 

Here, again, is a singular revelation. In 
the one case we found Vermont with its 
12,159 old lives in 100,000 to Wyoming's 
2,029; ^^d now we find that it has a gen- 
eral death rate so low as to be merely 
three-fourths of that of the average, with 
the death rate of its women as slightly 
higher. Do not the two facts together 
suggest a larger inherited vitality in Ver- 
mont, or a healthier environment ? It is 
in such respects that we read between the 
figures. But you see we must have con- 
tributory and concurrent statistics to enable 
us to make this reading. This table ' is 
marked ^^D.^^ By its study you can see 
that New Hampshire, Maine, and the older 
States generally, show the like vitality. 

I now come to specific disease in its re- 
lation to the insurance policy; and I have 
here a table made up under a division of 
diseases, as more recently grouped into re- 
lated types, and which shows the number 
of male deaths in proportion to 1,000 female 
deaths from the same causes. The head 
of the list is ^< Alcoholism. ^^ Here we find, 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 



153 



Table D. Comparative Death Rate of Sex as Shown for 
the Following Registration States by the U. S. Census 
Report for 1890. 



STATES 


POPULATION 


DEATHS 


DEATH 
RATE 


Connecticut 
Males . . 


369,538 
376,720 

85,573 
82,920 

109,584 
120,808 

1,087,709 
1,151,234 

186,566 
189,964 

720,819 
724,114 

2,976,893 
3,020,960 

168,025 
177,481 

169,327 
163,095 


1,652 
1,455 

3,171 

2,784 

22,739 
22,373 

3,560 
3,514 

16,072 
14,272 

65,303 
57,814 

3,821 
3,738 

2,657 
2,768 


20. -^S 


Females 


18.42 

IQ.^I 


Delaware 
Males 


Females 


17.55 
28.94 


Dist. of Columbia 
Males 


Females. 


23.04 
20.91 


Massachusetts 
Males 


Females 


19.43 
19.08 


New Hampshire 
Males 


Females 


18.50 

22.30 
19.71 

21.94 
19.14 

22.74 
21.06 


New Jersey 
Males 


Females 


New York 
Males 


Females 

Rhode Island 
Males 


Females 


Vermont 
Males 


15.69 
16.97 


Females 




Males 


5,874,034 
6,007,296 


126,507 
115,656 


21.54 
19.25 


Females 




Total 


11,881,330 


242,163 


20.38 





in the United States at large, 5,593 deaths 
among the males to 1,000 deaths among 
females, and in suicides, 3,583 males to the 
1,000 females; accidents and injuries, 3,301 



154 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

males to the i,ooo females. And so on, all 
down the list of causes, until we reach 
bronchitis, — as 1,009 males to 1,000 females; 
and only when we come to measles and 
scarlet fever, diphtheria, consumption, 
whooping cough, peritonitis, and cancer, do 
we find a preponderance among women, — 
as in the latter case (cancer) there are only 
601 male deaths to 1,000 of females. 

Thus, there is a revelation of the greater 
vitality of womanhood, as first indicated 
by the general statistics, and, then, as con- 
currently indicated by specific diseases, — 
the cause of which is the abstract story 
which may be read between the figures, 
and the correlation of which may be as 
easily discovered. This table is marked ^^ E.^^ 

I mentioned, as one of the significant les- 
sons of the table submitted, cancer, as 
more largely prevalent among women than 
among men. Let me tell you, this ques- 
tion of cancer has entered as a very dis- 
turbing one into the domain, not only of 
medicine and surgery and of the life insur- 
ance problem, but of the world's study 
and concern generally. For years it has 
been growing as a darkling apprehension; 
it is in fact the disease of all diseases to 
be dreaded, and is the one alone unattrib- 
utable to bacillus or other at present known- 
to-be-destroying cause. The United States 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 



155 



Table E. Deaths from Classified Causes. Number of 
Male Deaths in Proportion to 1,000 Females. 



CLASSIFIED CAUSES 



Alcoholism 

Suicide 

Accidents and Injuries 

Disease of the Urinary Organs. . . 

Tetanus and Trismus 

Venereal Diseases 

Stillborn 

Pleurisy 

Diseases of the Bones and Joints. 

Pneumonia 

Enteric Fever (Typhoid) 

Diseases of the Respiratory Org's 

Croup 

Diseases of the Nervous System.. 
Diseases of the Digestive System. 

Diarrheal Diseases 

Paralysis and Apoplexy 

Heart Disease and Dropsy 

Malarial Fever 

Infanticide 

Scrofula and Tabes 

Bronchitis 

Measles 

Scarlet Fever 

Diphtheria 

Consumption 

Whooping Cough 

Peritonitis 

Cancer 



UNITED 

STATES 

ALL AGES 



5,593 
3,583 
3,331 
1,883 

1,585 
1,416 

1,414 

1,393 
1,361 
1,266 

1,259 
1,195 
1,185 
1,178 

1,135 
1,114 
1,108 
1,077 

1,075 
1,048 
1,010 
1,009 
986 
968 

945 
918 
829 
730 
601 



271 CITIES 
ALL AGES 



3,341 
3,561 
3,317 
1,380 

1,552 
1,293 

1,395 
1,552 
1,550 
1,249 
1,360 
1,172 
1,179 
1,173 
1,070 
1,062 
1,019 
1,042 

1,031 

1,000 

1,037 

981 

1,006 

951 

967 

1,135 
801 

697 

518 



Census report gives prominence to its growth 
in this way; for i860, 902 deaths from can- 
cer in 100,000 deaths from all causes and 
all ages; 1870, 1,264; 1880, 1,727; 1890, 2,107, 
— much more than twice the death rate in 
30 years. On the surface of these figures 



156 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

the story told is startling; but before we 
come to a concltision let us see what the 
insurance statistics tell us. First, we must 
understand that there is little or no cancer 
below the age of 20, — which would bring 
the ratio of death by cancer to deaths from 
all causes above 20, much larger than these 
figures would indicate. 

I have here a table, which gives the 
mortuary history of one life insurance 
company yearly, from the year 1879 to the 
year 1898, which shows the total number 
of deaths from all causes, and the number 
of deaths from cancer and its per cent, for 
ages above 20. From this table it will be 
seen that the cancer death rate was larger 
in 1882 than it was in 1898, and that it 
has been substantially the like variable 
quantity from the one year to the other 
throughout the entire series, never but 
slightly exceeding the average. This is 
where the value of contributory statistics 
comes in. 

But what are we to understand as the 
meaning of the figures given by the United 
States Census? The doctors will tell you 
that undoubtedly it is due to the more 
definite discovery of this disease in its 
more remote types, and that where some 
obscure form of cancer was in years gone 
by classified under some other name, it is 



THE STORY OF VITAL STATISTICS 



157 



now more readily understood and correctly 
classified as cancer. This supposition, the 
history of the insurance companies, in one 
form or another, substantially bears out. 
From this we are to conclude that cancer 
is substantially no more of a disease now 
than it ever was. I submit this table 
marked «F.» 

Table P. Deaths from Cancer. Insured Lives. 





TOTAL 


DEATHS 








FROM 


PER CENT 


YEAR 


DEATHS 
ALL CAUSES 


CANCER 
NUMBER 


OF TOTAL 


1879 


425 


18 


4.23 


1880 


452 


28 


6.19 


I88I 


505 


29 


574 


1882 


499 


38 


7.62 


'^^3 


570 


27 


4-74 


'^^4 


541 


35 


6.47 


'^§5 


676 


32 


4-73 


1886 


664 


39 


5.87 


1887 


742 


44 


5-93 


1888 


800 


42 


5.25 


1889 


820 


51 


6.22 


1890 


846 


48 


5.67 


1891 


917 


47 


5.13 


1892 


1,045 


62 


5.93 


1893 


1,077 


55 


5.11 


1894 


1,052 


69 


6.56 


1895 


1,073 


74 


6.90 


1896 


1,256 


70 


5-57 


""H 


1,229 


91 


7.40 


1898 


1.331 


lOI 


7-59 



But cancer, happily, is not an extensive 
disease. In fact, it is now but about 7 per 
cent of the insured adult death rate, and 



158 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

less than 5 per cent of the community rate 
for all ages. The dominant diseases are 
consumption, pneumonia, and Bright's dis- 
ease ; and no intelligent physician of to-day 
despairs of their ultimate successful treat- 
ment. Of these, consumption is more 
largely a visitation of the young, pneu- 
monia of all ages, Bright's disease of the 
middle life to old age. In general terms, 
it may be said, that deaths under 40 are 
due to acute causes, from 50 and over to 
chronic causes, and from 40 to 50 partly to 
acute and partly to chronic causes. 

And now, as disposing of another popular 
illusion, and that as to the relative health- 
fulness of city and town, I will refer you, 
by way of conclusion, to my table ^<E^^ 
again, and say that as to nearly the whole 
question of disease, certainly as to those 
types which are more amenable to skillful 
treatment or wholesome restraint, there is 
a distinctive contrast between the country 
generally and the city specifically, in favor 
of the city generally, and very largely so 
in the case of alcoholism. 

Gentlemen, I thank you. 

(See reference note last page.) 






[ParagrapTis from a Published Letter. 1 

PARTNERSHIP VS. LIFE INSURANCE 



IT IS to be understood that a partnership 
effort is but the consolidation of so 
many individual efforts, having for its ulti- 
mate attainment the larger capitalization 
of the individual. Hence the merit of 
every proposition looking to the advantage 
of a partnership must be regarded from 
the standpoint of the individual seeking 
the ultimate improvement of his own estate. 

As the natural capital of an individual 
is stored up in his life, and as this is at 
all times subject to a total annihilation by 
death, insurance covering this contingency 
is now regarded as the primary evidence 
of business prudence, and by parity of 
reasoning, the protection of this capital, as 
consolidated in a partnership, has come to 
be regarded as demanding the same guar- 
antees of indemnity. 

As a primary understanding of this propo- 
sition, it should be stated that in the effort 
of the individual to realize, in concrete form, 
his natural capital, he is impelled to an 
effort, measured by his ability and oppor- 

(159) 



l60 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

tunity, more or less hazardous and uncer- 
tain, and burdened with a larger or lesser 
sense of duty, as his desires and sentiments 
may be more or less involved. In the 
homely language of wisdom, man is en- 
joined ^^ to lay up for a rainy day,^^ and 
sensibly or insensibly, healthy, earnest, and 
self-respecting life is at all times seeking 
to do this. But in the growing complexity 
of the social structure, man, standing alone, 
realizes a sense of incompleteness, or limi- 
tation, which association tends to improve 
upon. It follows, therefore, that a partner- 
ship is but the individual, in a more 
general sense, striving, in obedience to this 
injunction, to lay up for a possible need. 

But in this effort to provide for the 
morrow, that is to say, for that period in 
life when opportunity may narrow, or abil- 
ity lessen, or age demand its requirement 
of sustained rest, there is, in so many forms, 
the threat of individual failure which is les- 
sened in proportion as the individual seeks 
the equation of numbers and possibilities. 
It has, therefore, come to be the latter 
and higher injunction of wisdom to call 
into play the guaranties of the many as 
protecting the one. It is seen that in com- 
munities where there is great poverty there 
is also great wealth, and where there is 
marked deprivation there is also as marked 



PARTNERSHIP VS. LIFE INSURANCE l6l 

a comfort; that while individuals fail com- 
munities prosper; that v^hile individuals 
die, the many live on forever; and that 
where equation is feasible, and in the 
directions desired, the individual may be 
regarded as wise only, and as expending 
his effort for the larger profit, where he 
has obtained the guaranties of the whole 
as an average share to the one. 

The property of an individual, as created 
and visible, is always vulnerable. An earth- 
quake, a cyclone, a thunderstorm, a war, 
the destroying elements of water or fire, 
the defective title, and technicalities of 
law, the visitations of anger, and the 
machinations of the rascal, are his con- 
stant threats, while the property of the 
many experiences all this but as the ordi- 
nary tax, largely within the margin of 
general profit. 

Life insurance is but a name for a dis- 
dnctive form of guaranty to the individual, 
predicated upon the largest possible as- 
sociation of partnership of the many in 
their recognized character of property cre- 
ators. After a profit has resulted from the 
ordinary effort, in the ordinary applications 
of energy, this is the opportunity for the 
further partnership of the dollar for the 
attainment of an absolute guaranty, of a 
certain indemnity, and of an average profit, 



l62 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

as supplemental to, and over and beyond 
the realizations of the individual in his 
more immediate ventures. 

Unlike the property guaranties created 
by the individual for the protection of his 
family, or his various enterprises, or partner- 
ship undertakings, which await the slow 
aggregation of the dollar coined by the 
sweat of his brow, and added, dollar to 
dollar, until the capital sum has been cre- 
ated, this is a property guaranty that may 
be created at once, in keeping with his 
present needs, and far beyond his present 
ability. Not as a property that wastes or 
burdens, but that stores up, increases in 
value, and becomes an actual, life-sustain- 
ing investment. 



[From The Western Insurance Review, May, 189L ] 

POEM ON LIFE INSURANCE 



Read by the author at a banquet of Life Insurance 
Agents in St. Louis, Mo., as the conclusion of 
a response to the toast: ^^nsurance— in Its 
Noblest Function — the Equation of the Potenti- 
alities of Life.^ 



For Life Insurance respondent, 

To-night, as the poet's lyre, 
I touch the harp of life's heart-strings 

To the voice of a countless choir ; 
As moved by a holy impulse, 

As called by an unseen throng, 
I waken the strains of the prelude. 

And scatter the waves of song. 

Insurance of life is of structure 

The bond of the good and true, 
The strength of the strongest strivers, 

For the best the better may do ; — 
The symbol of manhood's affection. 

The coigne of that larger estate 
For which the ambitious struggle, 

And the patient labor and wait. 

(163) 



l64 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

Thus, Up through the range of endearment, 

Life's tenderer chords are rung. 
And out from the souls of the helpful 

The sounds in accord are flung ; — 
As the jubilee of attainment. 

As the chorus of content. 
When the fruitage of thrift is garnered, 

And the vigor of youth is spent. 

For Life Insurance respondent — 

As ever its guerdon to be — 
Are the harp, the song, and the chorus, 

Life's chords and its symphony, 
As a pean of praise through the harvest — 

Resung in the heavens above — 
To the Christ in manhood's endeavor, 

To the God in consummate love. 



[From The Chronicle, New York, Thursday, June 12, 1890.] 

EQUATION'S WARRIORS 



Read at a banquet of Life Insurance Agents — 
A tribute to their noble calling. 



Soldiers of Life ! Thus do I hail thee here — 
Thou sturdy strivers in the cause of 
right ; 
Soldiers, indeed, though in thy hands appear 
No crime-stained symbols of the wrath 
of might. 
Thine are the deeds of conscience and of 
peace ; 
Thy strife a battle as against all vice ; 
Thy triumphs win for sorrow its surcease ; 
Thy dead relive as poverty's suffice. 

No plundered cities mark thy ruthless march ; 
No ruined hearths complain of thee to 
God; 
Thy trophies deck no tyrant-praising arch ; 
Thy feet imprint no blood-ensanguined 
sod. 

(165) 



l66 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

Instead, the desert blooms beneath thy tread ; 

Instead, religion's self doth plead for 
thee; 
Instead, thy guerdon is the cherub's head, 

And grateful love doth chant thy jubilee. 

Thine is the banner of equation, raised 

By seam-browed science in behalf of 
man; 
On this hath ever inspiration gazed 

Since single life was merged into the 
clan. 
Of this thy strength, and fated to implant 

On hope's high citadel the symboled ray, 
As lighting faith from out the sloughs of 
want. 
And robbing loss of its fell power to slay. 

Soldiers of Light ! I hail thee as the van 
Of that all-potent impulse of the soul. 
Which round the world is linking man to 
man. 
And massing all in God's millennial 
whole. 
Predestined force! Thou art its sappers 
come, 
Its miners, piercing truth's obstructed 
way; — 
Concentering heaven in each earthly home, 
And freeing mind from doubt's corroding 
sway. 



equation's warriors 167 

Predestined force ! So seen and felt by all 
The higher watchmen on life's outward 
posts; — 
Whose midnight challenge, answered from 
the wall, 
Gives out the cry : ^^ They come, life's 
heaven-born hosts. ^^ 
They come, — ah, yes, as far as eye can 
see. 
As far as thought can beat with tireless 
wing, 
And still beyond, as God's immensity. 

There comes the host — for Christ all 
conquering. 

For Christ — the better thought in all that 
was, 
And still in all there is, or is to be ; — 
The better soul is still the better cause, 

Until the best is one humanity. 
Predestined force! In linked gradations 
born ; — 
Each birth determined for its kind and 
need ; — 
Resowing worth until the cruel thorn 

Is plucked forever from all human creed. 

I hail thee, knights, as they of old were 
hailed. 
Who succored innocence and helped the 
weak ; — 



l68 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

Whose mighty prowess virtue's foes impaled, 
And raised on high the lowly and the 
meek. 
Thine is the armor of the Crucified; 

Thy shield His blessing and thy sword 
His kiss ; 
Thy mission now to brush grim want aside, 
And wake despair to life's entrancing 
bliss. 

So go thee forth — so seen and named of men, 

So called of God and planoplied of Christ ; 
Give Want proud battle, strive and strive 
again, 

Until earth's plenty hath for all sufficed. 
So go thee forth, unminded those who hail 

With cynic's jibe and folly's saltless jest. 
Virtue is victor, — let this thought prevail 

Sooner or later in each human breast. 



[From the Dallas (Texas) M'jrning Neivs, Tuesday, June 28, 1892.] 

THE BROTHERHOOD OF LIFE 



Postprandial poem read at an insurance gathering of 
lyife Agents and Policy Holders in Dallas, Texas. 



Suggested by a consideration of the enormous 
good that has already been wrought by, and the 
still greater beneficence which must follow, the 
co-operation of the healthy and thrifty of earth 
as Life Insurance Policy Holders. 



As NOW the Millennium bringing, 

The sun, in its ripening course, 
Is fast recruiting the strong of arm 

To be as the heart's set force ; — 
As the masters of endeavor, 

As the victors in all strife, 
To be, as of God's enlisted corps, 

The Brotherhood of Life. 

And one by one they are sought for — 
The Knights of this new Crusade, 

Sought by the priests whose call it is 
To preach in the marts of trade; — 

(169) 



170 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

To preach to the young and the aged, 
From the text of the closing sod, 

The gospel of life's equation — told 
As the providence of God. 

And one by one they are gathered — 

As those who may muster in, 
As now the soul-born legion fought 

Through poverty and sin; — 
As now for the home-hearth victor, 

As now of its altar blessed, 
The rhythmic march of a mitred band 

To the hymn of a saintly quest. 

For so is affection marshalled — 

Where now hath its virtue place, 
In every garb that worth may know, 

In every hue of race; — 
Thus pledged as brother to brother, 

Thus sworn as a soldier-host. 
The soul in united phalanx led — 

A militant holy ghost. 

To succor the widow and orphan, 

To save for the older self, 
To lay up for love, and its angels found, 

Life's otherwise sordid pelf, 
This is the brotherhood's mission; — 

And so hath its deeds sufficed 
To lift the thorn-crown, still as seen. 

From off the brow of Christ. 



THE BROTHERHOOD OF LIFE 171 

Already its conquests gladden 

The nearer realms of earth, 
And daily its spirit spreads abroad 

With ever a larger birth; 
Already is hope the brighter, 

Already is want the less, 
And more and more of heaven sown 

In every day's caress. 

The Millennium's dawn is nearing, — 

For so is Equation's light 
The new archangel winged and sped 

Through the nethermost shades of 
night ; — 
Proclaiming as now of comfort, 

Of peace with freedom rife, 
The world redeemed and sceptered in 

The Brotherhood of Life. 



THE TRIBUTE OF A TEAR 



In memory of the late Charles H. Ferguson of 
Chicago, ex-president of the National Life 
Underwriters' Association. 



The morning breaks upon the city's sleep; 

A whirl of snow beleaguers those who stir, 
Save but where traffic must its house-rounds 
keep, 

No call to toil upon the senses spur. 

It is the Sabbath day. In yonder room 
The cold, gray dawn lights up a scene of 
death ; 

A ghostly form emerges from the gloom — 
A stilly shape unconscious of a breath. 

The wind, in gusty turn a requiem sings ; 
Against the panes I hear the ripples 
sound ; — 
From roof to roof, it spreads on fleecy 
wings. 
To wrap as in a sheet the landscape 
round. 
(172) 



THE TRIBUTE OF A TEAR I73 

With sad conjunction memory views the 
scene, 
And brims the heart to wake the poet's 
lyre, — 
As from the soul to waft the strains serene, 
As soul to soul, above the funeral pyre. 



II 

Dear Friend: — These flowers, laid upon thy 
breast. 

We know unmeaning are to that dull clay, 
But to the spirit that is now confessed, 

They will be presence of its Yesterday, — 

Not dead, nor dying, but of things concrete, — 
Whereof was life as of the mortal shown. 

The human, always, in the more complete, — 
They will exhale, forever, of the Known. 

Of pain and sorrow blest, and of the thrall 
Wherein are mother earth's most precious 
gifts. 

They come to thee, unreckoning of the pall, 
To greet the soul that now the veil uplifts ; 

To tell thee, parting, we who linger here, — 
For so hath manhood in thy person 
wrought. 

And so, for thee, enshrining is the bier, — 
Our turns will come before thou art forgot. 



174 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 

III 

We knew him toiling in the summer's heat, 
The autumn's chill, the winter's frozen 
blast ; — 

His heart bereft of its companion, beat 
Its one sweet solace — faithful to the past. 

We know him toiling, thus, as fathers do. 
To build for those who bear the mother's 
face. 

To keep, as still within the mother's view. 
The dear one's portrait in its wonted place. 

The home-hearth cheerful and its welcome 
pure, — 
As from the cradle to the years of sense, 
He reared his boys, to where his toil made 
sure. 
And gave to need what pity would dispense. 

If, in the struggle, he forgot a friend. 
No anger now assails the name he bore ; 

Sorrow, alone, is comment on the end. 
An only love speeds to — the gone-b e fore. 



IV 

And we who feel, as yet, the brunt of life. 
What shall, to us, the higher tribute be ? 

To die a captain in successful strife, — 
Is not this meed enough for you and me? 



THE TRIBUTE OF A TEAR 175 

Come, let the faith be ours, for so we may, 
Take death to witness, when the soul 
would grow, 

As, one by one, the links are snapped away. 
Shall we not seek, nor fear the call to go ? 

Beyond the bier, we may not read the skies, 
But, still, we know the infinite is there, 

And that the dread is not for him who dies, 
But of the burdens that the living bear. 

Our friend is gone — but we, his friends, 
remain, — 

Shall not the sequel be as who shall, here, 
Relieve the world the most of care and pain, 

Nor save till death the tribute of a tear} 



176 CONCRETE IDENTITIES 



Reference Note Page 158. 

It is important .that the student of vital statistics 
should know that the cancer germ has been found since 
the delivery of my address in Worcester. It was discov- 
ered in 1900, by Dr. Joseph Eisen of San Francisco. In 
May, 1901, the doctor was inoculated by the germ, and 
was operated upon for cancer by his brother physicians. 
Dr. Eisen believes he became inoculated by making" 
microscopic studies of the germ ; this will seem to dis- 
pose of cancer as an hereditary disease, and to justify 
hope in the speedy discovery of means to its cure if not 
to its total eradication. 

W. P. Stewart. 



Martyred Humanity 

AND 

Other Poems 

BY 

VALENTINE STEWART 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE SURRY BOOK COMPANY 

New York 



0»t U 1901 



No 123 23 1301 



r- 



b'^r 



